FIFA will
continue its review of the bidding process for the 2018 and 2022 World Cups, at
least internally. FIFA's chief investigator and its ethics judge, at odds since
the first results were published, met on Thursday.
Deutsche Welle, 20 Nov 2014
Michael
Garcia and Hans-Joachim Eckert (pictured) met on Thursday in Zurich to try to
iron out their differences over FIFA's internal investigation into the 2018 and
2022 World Cup bidding process.
When Eckert
released a 42-page summary of Garcia's original 420-page investigation last
week, Garcia immediately complained that the summary was based on
"materially incomplete and erroneous" interpretations of his original
findings.
FIFA
announced in a statement afterwards, signed by both Garcia and Eckert, that the
German judge and the former US federal prosecutor had agreed to bring in
another pair of eyes - and possibly more besides.
"The
chairman of the adjudicatory chamber [Eckert] and the chairman of the
investigatory chamber of the FIFA Ethics Committee [Garcia] met today to discuss
the recent developments," said the FIFA statement. "Both chairmen
agreed that it is of major importance that the FIFA Executive Committee has the
information necessary to evaluate which steps are required based on the work
done by the FIFA Ethics Committee."
Scala to
read the full report
To this
end, FIFA said, the pair agreed that Domenico Scala, the Swiss-Italian chairman
of the FIFA Audit and Compliance Committee, "will reveive full copies of
all reports of the investigatory chamber...to determine how much of that
information should be made available to the FIFA Executive Committee."
According
to FIFA, both Eckert and Garcia also agreed "to answer any questions
[Scala] might have."
Prior to
Scala, only a handful of people had laid eyes on Garcia's original
investigation into the December 2010 votes awarding the 2018 World Cup to
Russia and the 2022 tournament to Qatar.
When Eckert
first presented his summary of Garcia's investigation he said that it cleared
Russia and Qatar of charges of corruption, noting only "minor" cases,
and declared the review process for the tournaments "closed." Garcia,
who had also repeatedly complained about the levels of access he received when
carrying out his investigations, swiftly announced his intention to appeal
against this within FIFA.
Thursday's
statement made no explicit mention of whether FIFA still considered the review
process to be completed.
FIFA on
Tuesday filed criminal complaints against unnamed individuals on the basis of
the investigation, following days of criticism about a lack of transparency in
the investigative process.
Several
European football officials, perhaps most notably Reinhard Rauball, the
president of the German Football League (DFL), had said that European soccer
body UEFA might have to consider a split from FIFA unless Garcia's complete
findings were made public.
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