Michael Garcia's role in investigating Fifa was reportedly under threat last week. Sebastien Bozon / AFP
Michael Garcia's role in investigating Fifa was reportedly under threat last week. Sebastien Bozon / AFP
Michael Garcia's role in investigating Fifa was reportedly under threat last week. Sebastien Bozon / AFP
Michael Garcia's role in investigating Fifa was reportedly under threat last week. Sebastien Bozon / AFP

Sport

Claims there was a move to try and quell Michael Garcia's attempts to investigate handling of World Cup votes and other Fifa activities.

Reuters

March 25, 2014

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LONDON // Fifa’s self-acclaimed transparent reform process headed by New York lawyer Michael Garcia came within hours of being sabotaged from within the organisation last week.

The position of Garcia himself and his role as the head of the Independent Ethics Commission looking into alleged corruption surrounding the voting procedure for the 2018 and 2022 World Cups, and the 2011 Fifa presidential election, came under threat from a number of senior Fifa power-brokers.

Members of Fifa’s executive committee (ExCo) said they would have considered their positions had the investigation into Fifa’s affairs by Garcia been halted before he had completed his work.

A number of reform-minded members confirmed they stopped the plan before it was even discussed in full session, after being approached in the corridors between sessions of the ExCo meetings at Fifa’s headquarters in Zurich on Thursday and Friday.

At almost exactly the same time, Garcia was in Zurich carrying out further investigations into Fifa’s workings.

There is no suggestion Fifa president Sepp Blatter played any role in the plan to stop what he has widely acclaimed as Fifa’s new “transparent” reform process.

It is understood from sources that the plan not only involved removing Garcia from his post as the chief investigator into alleged corruption at Fifa, but also the game worldwide.

When approached to comment on the alleged plot to end the investigation, Fifa’s British vice president, Jim Boyce, said as far as he was concerned, he would have had to consider his position had any attempt to halt the investigation succeeded.

The 70-year-old Northern Irishman, who is also the head of Fifa’s referee’s committee, although he steps down from the committee in 15 months time, said of the subject: “There was a bit of informal chat about the possibility that some people wanted to see Garcia removed from the inquiry and that it might be raised at the ExCo meeting, but it wasn’t.

“As someone who has been brought up with honesty and integrity – and it was a great honour for me to be asked to be a vice president – if this had been proposed at the ExCo meeting, or I thought for one moment Garcia would be removed in any fashion from carrying out his full investigation, I and others would be aghast and would have had to consider our positions because things at Fifa have been improving greatly.”

Fifa did not respond to requests for a statement on the matter, while a spokesperson for Garcia’s office in New York issued a “no comment” reply to a request to establish if Garcia was aware of the plans to end his role.

Last week, it was reported that Garcia had spoken to some of the 13 members of the ExCo who are still in office and who took part in voting for the 2018 and 2022 World Cups.

The 2018 World Cup was awarded to Russia and the 2022 finals to Qatar on the same day in Zurich on December 2, 2010. One senior Fifa source said: “I have never understood to this day why there was a double bid. It still makes no sense to me.”

The reform process was instigated following the scandals that engulfed the awarding of those finals as well as the 2011 presidential election campaign.

It was approved by Congress in June 2011 while Garcia himself was appointed in June 2012 at an extraordinary executive committee meeting.

Garcia, the former attorney for the Southern District of New York, was empowered by Congress to “leave no stone unturned” in his quest to discover if there had been any wrongdoing regarding the voting procedures in the World Cup bidding process.

As Fifa’s first independent ethics investigator and prosecutor he was also empowered to investigate the votes-for-cash scandal that led to long-serving and high-ranking Fifa officials Jack Warner and Mohamed bin Hammam leaving the organisation.

Warner, the Fifa vice president for Concacaf, the confederation that covers North and Central America and the Caribbean, had been an ExCo member for more than 20 years while Qatari Bin Hammam was a Fifa vice president and president of the Asian Football Confederation, but their careers ended after the votes-for-cash scandal shortly before Bin Hammam had been due to challenge Blatter for the presidency in 2011.

Warner walked away from Fifa while Bin Hammam was later banned for life for his role in the doomed corruption bid which involved paying members of the Caribbean Football Union to vote for him against Blatter in the presidential vote.

Last week, it was alleged by English newspaper The Daily Telegraph that a company owned by Bin Hammam had paid a total of US$3.2 million (Dh11.7m) to Warner and his sons around the time of Qatar’s successful bid for the 2022 World Cup.

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