FIFA’s independent committee in charge of rulings on possible corruption in 2018 and 2022 World Cup bidding will not come to any conclusions until 2015. Joachim Eckert, the German judge who chairs the committee, said that a decision will be handed down early next year and that the case will never be made public.
Decisions in FIFA World Cup corruption case not coming until 2015
Not only have the decisions been pushed back, but none of it will be made public.
Stanley Chou
“There will be some decisions, maybe in spring,” Eckert said at an ethics in sport conference hosted by FIFA.
The lead investigator, former U.S. attorney Michael Garcia, was a month late in delivering the report to the committee, so the decisions were always going to be delayed.
The committee also doesn’t have a choice on whether the details of the case will be made public. That is determined by FIFA.
“You cannot expect for anything to be disclosed from this report to the public,” he told the conference. “There is an obligation for secrecy and we will comply with this.”
Eckert also confirmed what Sepp Blatter has said before, that the committee did not have the power to strip either Russia or Qatar of their hosting rights. That power remains with the FIFA executive committee, who awarded the countries the tournament, or, if FIFA chooses, the full 209-nation FIFA congress.
What Eckert’s committee does have is the power to sanction individuals. The committe can fine, suspend or even banish people within FIFA or national federations for corruption, if they wish. Odds are that will happen, with both FIFA and Eckert implying that Garcia’s report indicated that there had been finding of misdoing.
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