Secret Fifa report reveals shady acts, but no smoking gun

ZURICH — Over the course of 430 pages, the secret report provides provocative glimpses of unmistakably questionable behaviour by some of world football’s top officials, as well as others eager to meet their every demand.

Huge amounts of money ending up in strange places. High-ranking executives behaving shadily, petulantly and, at times, perhaps illegally.

Rules broken, slyly circumvented or simply bent beyond their intent.

The document, known as the Garcia report in tribute to the American who compiled it, but kept secret by Fifa’s ethics committee for more than two years, was surprisingly published on Tuesday by Fifa itself. The release confirmed, and in some cases revealed, long-sought details of an investigation into the bidding process for the 2018 and 2022 World Cups.

Fifa released the report, it said, “for the sake of transparency” — although it notably did so only after a German newspaper revealed on Monday that it had obtained a copy and planned to gradually reveal its unsavoury details.

The report was submitted in 2014 by Michael J Garcia, a former US attorney who had served as Fifa’s chief ethics investigator, and contained the findings of a months-long examination he had conducted into the vote in December 2010 — widely reported to have been tainted by corruption — that awarded the 2018 tournament to Russia and the 2022 event to Qatar.

What the Garcia report did not have, in the end, was any hard evidence that the committees for Russia and Qatar had used bribes to secure the 2018 and 2022 World Cups, any smoking gun that might have compelled Fifa to consider moving either of the events or reopening the bidding for them.

Regardless, the dossier provided a troubling view of a deeply flawed voting process; confirmed various news reports from around the world in the years since the vote was taken about inappropriate and unethical behaviour by people close to the bids and voters they sought to influence; and painted a broad portrait conveying a general “appearance of impropriety”, to borrow an oft-used phrase from Mr Garcia, its author.

Among his findings:

• While there was no direct evidence of the buying of votes directed by Qatar’s official bid committee, Mr Garcia documented in dozens and dozens of pages his concerns about the troubling closeness of Qatar’s government and the country’s bid committee, and of improper conduct by consultants hoping to advance the bid.

• Russian president Vladimir Putin, who was then the country’s prime minister, met half a dozen Fifa voters in the months before the 2010 vote. But Russia’s bid committee was cleared of wrongdoing, with the report finding no evidence of collusion with other bids, no violations of rules on gifts, and no signs that the Russians had tried to exert influence on any voters.

• Mr Garcia recounted in detail the ways in which executive committee members and other people of interest ignored, or lashed out at, his questions, professed ignorance on simple matters, or otherwise failed to cooperate with his investigation. His general frustrations revealed the limits of his powers in the investigation, in which he did not have subpoena power, even though it did reveal direct or indirect favours done for votes: A football field constructed in a voter’s country, trans-Atlantic flights on private jets, and — in one memorable example — a US$2 million (S$2.77 million) payment deposited into the account of a Fifa voter’s 10-year-old daughter.

The investigation also revealed, through minutes of internal Fifa meetings, that the governing body’s executive committee had not even discussed the issue of the searing summer heat in Qatar before awarding the country a tournament traditionally played in June and July — even though Fifa’s own inspectors had flagged the issue as a major concern.

And through those same minutes, Mr Garcia found that when it later became clear that moving the World Cup to the comparatively milder Persian Gulf winter was the only option, Fifa secretly extricated itself from a potential legal fight by awarding Fox Sports the television rights to the 2026 cycle at what was clear, even then, to be an enormously discounted fee that most likely cost Fifa hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue.

The Garcia report had achieved something of a mythical status in the years it remained hidden from the public eye.

Mr Garcia submitted his report in 2014, stating afterwards that his team had uncovered “serious and wide-ranging issues” in the selection process.

But despite appeals for transparency from Mr Garcia and several members of Fifa’s ruling executive committee, including at least one who has since pleaded guilty in a separate, ongoing Fifa corruption investigation, the report was never released.

Instead, Hans-Joachim Eckert of Germany, who at the time was serving as the chief judge of Fifa’s ethics committee, published a 42-page summary of Mr Garcia’s report that asserted, in apparent contrast to the latter’s conclusions, that the voting process had not been corrupted.

Mr Eckert also rejected the idea that any violations should lead to a reopening of the bidding process for the tournaments, and Fifa’s leadership, then led by Mr Sepp Blatter, quickly declared the matter closed.

A month later, after losing an appeal related to the case, Mr Garcia resigned from his position in protest, charging at the time that Mr Eckert’s abridged report included “numerous materially incomplete and erroneous representations of the facts and conclusions”.

The matter re-emerged this week when Bild, a widely read German tabloid, announced that it had procured a copy of the report.

Peter Rossberg, the Bild reporter who obtained it, wrote on his Facebook page late on Monday that the dossier did not provide “definitive proof” that the 2018 and 2022 World Cups had been bought. He said, however, that it nevertheless provided important details that would contribute to a larger picture of what he called a “completely corrupt system”.

But before Bild could publish its exclusive, Fifa scooped the newspaper by releasing the report on its website on Tuesday morning.

In a news release, Fifa said that “the new chairpersons of the independent Ethics Committee, Mara Claudia Rojas of the investigatory chamber, and Vassilios Skouris of the adjudicatory chamber, have decided to publish the report”, and contended that Fifa’s current president Gianni Infantino had “on numerous occasions” called for the report’s release.

“Despite these regular requests,” Fifa said in the statement, “it is worth noting that the former chairpersons of the Ethics Committee, Cornel Borbely and Hans-Joachim Eckert, had always refused to publish it.”

Later on Tuesday, in their own statement, Mr Eckert and Mr Borbely, who had replaced Mr Garcia as Fifa’s top investigator, denied such a premise. “To this day,” they said, “Mr Infantino has never contacted us and asked for a publication.”

Mr Eckert, who had said privacy concerns made publication of the report “impossible”, and Mr Borbely were removed from their posts this year. At the time, they implied that their ongoing ethics investigations into several top figures at Fifa had been thwarted by their ouster. Critics of their removal complained that the open cases had been set back months by the change in leadership of the ethics posts.

Yet, on Tuesday, Fifa claimed the high ground. “For the sake of transparency,” it said, “Fifa welcomes the news that this report has now been finally published.” THE NEW YORK TIMES