PARIS: FIFA faces a vote next week on whether or not to publish the controversial and sensitive report into alleged wrongdoing during the bidding for the 2018 and 2022 World Cups.
The sport’s world governing body will discuss the matter at its two-day executive committee meeting on the sidelines of the Club World Cup in Morocco on December 18-19.
The agenda released yesterday for the meeting will hear a proposal by Theo Zwanziger, former head of the German football association and a critic of the decision to award the 2022 Cup to Qatar.
Britain’s Daily Telegraph claimed Zwanziger wanted a redacted version of the full Ethics Committee report published to protect the identities of witnesses who co-operated with the probe led by US lawyer Michael Garcia.
Garcia carried out an 18-month investigation into the bidding which led to the awarding of the 2018 tournament to Russia and the 2022 tournament to Qatar.
The former New York federal prosecutor’s 350-page report summed up the probe that involved interviewing over 75 witnesses and a dossier of more than 200,000 pages and audio interviews.
Garcia had blasted as “incomplete and erroneous” a subsequent version of his report.
German Judge Hans-Joachim Eckert, Chairman of the adjudicatory chamber of FIFA’s independent ethics committee, said the probe had not yielded evidence of wrongdoing and there would be no re-vote on the tournaments.
He also argued that Garcia’s report could not be published for legal reasons. AFP
