Fifa lodges criminal complaint with Swiss courts over World Cup bids

• Complaint regards ‘possible misconduct of individuals’
• Blatter insists Garcia report will not be published
• Germany warns Uefa may quit Fifa
• Garcia attacks ‘erroneous’ ethics report

The Guardian, Owen Gibson, Tuesday 18 November 2014

The Fifa president, Sepp Blatter, says there are ‘grounds for suspicion that
 international transfers of assets with connections to Switzerland took place’.
Photograph: Harold Cunningham/Getty Images

In a further twist to its farcical attempt to deal with corruption allegations surrounding the 2018 and 2022 World Cup bidding race, Fifa has lodged a criminal complaint against certain individuals involved with the Swiss authorities.

Fifa’s president, Sepp Blatter, lodged the complaint at the behest of the German judge Hans-Joachim Eckert, whose summary of Michael Garcia’s 430-page investigation was disowned by the American attorney. The full report will be made available to the Swiss attorney general in Berne, who will decide whether criminal charges should follow.

“In particular there seem to be grounds for suspicion that, in isolated cases, international transfers of assets with connections to Switzerland took place, which merit examination by the criminal prosecution authorities,” said Fifa ina statement.

Eckert’s summary included a series of concerns over Qatar’s bid but said payments made by Mohammed Bin Hammam, the disgraced former Asian Football Confederation president, to former Fifa vice president Jack Warner and African football officials could not be linked to the World Cup bid. The move will inevitably be viewed with cynicism given Blatter’s track record of using the Swiss courts and Fifa’s regulatory processes to kick problematic issues into the long grass and deflect attention onto individuals who have already left football.

Eckert’s summary of Garcia’s probe – which cost £6m and took 18 months – effectively cleared Russia and Qatar of serious wrongdoing, despite the former being unable to provide any email evidence because they claimed it had been wiped and a list of concerns over the latter.

The judge also hit back at claims that his summary represented a whitewash. “I would like to point out that not once did my statement involve a so-called ‘whitewashing’ of the award process with regard to the various allegations and assumptions made, contrary to what has been claimed in some quarters,” he said.

“My statement was based on the Garcia report – I can only work with the material contained in it, and in my view, there was insufficient clear evidence of illegal or irregular conduct that would call into question the integrity of the award process as a whole.”

He said that he would continue to consider charges against certain individuals under Fifa’s ethics codes and said “further clarification” was still needed of some of the circumstances covered by the report.

Hours after Eckert’s summary was published, in which Blatter was praised and the bidding process bizarrely described as “well thought out, robust and professional”, Garcia said he had misrepresented the facts and conclusions of his report.

Blatter said there was “no change” to Eckert’s decision to close the book on the 2018 and 2022 bidding processes and insisted the ethics committee had done its job.

“I have no doubt that the Ethics Committee has done all it possibly could under the Fifa Statutes to shed light on the issues surrounding the awarding of the World Cups,” he said.

Blatter claims not to have seen Garcia’s full report but said he complied with Eckert’s request to report the individuals concerned to the Swiss Attorney General’s office. He claimed that if Garcia’s report was published in full it would violate Swiss law.

“If we had anything to hide, we would hardly be taking this matter to the Office of the Attorney General. Fifa’s internal bodies have done all they can within the scope of their capabilities, and they are continuing with their work,” he said.

“The matter will now also be looked at by an independent, state body, which shows that Fifa is not opposed to transparency.”

Football Association chairman Greg Dyke, Uefa president Michel Platini, US Soccer Federation president Sunil Gulati and Concacaf president Jeffrey Webb are among those who have called for the report to be published in full, with appropriate redactions to protect whistleblowers if necessary.

Eckert, the head of the adjudicatory chamber of the supposedly independent Fifa ethics committee, and Garcia, the head of the investigatory arm, are due to meet on Thursday in a bid to settle their differences.

However, Eckert has already said he will not consider publishing the report in full and Blatter’s comments appear to close the door on that possibility.