FIFA president Gianni Infantino booted ethics committee members who were investigating him

The ouster of Sepp Blatter returned credibility to FIFA for all of ... a few months. New president Gianni Infantino is already looking extremely suspicious after he ordered the replacement of ethics committee members while they were investigating him for possible wrongdoing.

When they were removed, FIFA investigators Hans-Joachim Eckert and Cornel Borbely said that their exit would “greatly set back the work of the ethics commission and means the de facto end of FIFA’s reform efforts,” adding, “this will inevitably lead to a renewed loss of trust and further hurt the already tarnished image of FIFA.”

Before Infantino moved to replace Eckert and Borbely, they had started looking into complaints that Infantino and FIFA general secretary Fatma Samoura acted unethically to influence the CAF presidential election. Some African football officials alleged that Infantino and Samoura made promises to divert funding to the FAs of members who voted for their preferred candidate, Ahmad Ahmad, who was elected in March.

There isn’t any publicly available evidence that these accusations are true, and there may be no firm evidence at all. But FIFA got rid of the people looking into it before they could get their investigation off the ground.

Infantino isn’t doing a good job of crafting a better public image for FIFA and himself than his predecessor. No one has any reason to believe that corruption has been cleaned up at FIFA.

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