FIFA dismisses complaints from World Cup whistleblowers In the latest farcical twist in FIFA’s World Cup bidding investigation, the federations disciplinary committee has dismissed the complaints of whistleblowers Phaedra Al Majid and Bonita Mersiades. Almajid, who worked on Qatar’s bid communications, and former Australia 2022 executive Bonita Mersiades, submitted complaints to FIFA about Eckert’s dismissal of their evidence to Garcia. They were exposed and trashed in Eckert’s summary of FIFA investigator Michael Garcia’s 430-page report following his 18-month bidding probe. Almajid and Mersiades accused FIFA’s ethics chiefs of breaching confidentiality pledges. In an Op-Ed for the Guardian newspaper last month, Mersiades said she had cooperated with Garcia despite “low expectations of an investigation by FIFA of FIFA from someone paid by FIFA”. Having shared “what I knew and what I had observed”, she said, “Like Phaedra, I was traduced by Eckert”. But FIFA clearly saw it differently. Claudio Sulser, chair of FIFA’s Disciplinary Committee, ruled there were “no grounds for complaints” by Almajid and Mersiades. “Regarding the complaints brought by the participants in the 2018/2022 inquiry against the chairman of the adjudicatory chamber of the independent Ethics Committee, Hans-Joachim Eckert, FIFA’s Disciplinary Committee chairman has concluded that there were no grounds to justify the opening of disciplinary proceedings,” a FIFA statement said today. FIFA said Sulser had reviewed all provided material “and stressed that since the participants in the investigation had gone public with their own media activities long before the publication of the statement of the chairman of the adjudicatory chamber Judge Eckert, the breach of confidentiality claim had no substance”. FIFA laughably justified the ruling by claiming that neither of the whistleblowers was identified in Eckert’s summary. “What is more, no names were mentioned in the statement and any information provided was of a general nature,” the statement said. “Thus, there was no divulgence of any information of a confidential nature.” Both whistleblowers rightly claimed that the information they gave to Garcia had helped shape some of the conclusions in Garcia’s report, summarized by Eckert. Again, FIFA saw it very differently. “The statement of Judge Eckert also mentions that the report from the chairman and deputy chairman of the investigatory chamber did not rely on any information or material received from the participants in the investigation in reaching any conclusion in the report,” the FIFA statement said. FIFA said Garcia, chairman of the investigatory chamber of FIFA’s ethics committee, had said in a letter to Sulser that the complaints by the participants in the investigation were “without merit and that, as far as he was concerned, there had been no infringements by Eckert”. Today’s statement comes a few days before the FIFA ExCo meets in Marrakesh, Morocco. FIFA remains under pressure to publish Garcia’s report in full with some names redacted to protect the identities of the other 73 interviewees who gave information to the former US attorney. In a report to the ExCo, Dominic Scala, head of FIFA’s audit and compliance committee, could make a ruling on how much of Garcia’s report should be made available to FIFA’s ruling body. This might then lead to more of Garcia’s report being made public.
Posted on: Tue, 16 Dec 2014 13:24:03 +0000
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