Warner among six FIFA members accused of wrong doing in bidding

LONDON (AP):

Six FIFA executive committee members were accused of ethical misconduct in the bidding for the 2018 and 2022 World Cups during a British parliamentary hearing into soccer yesterday.

Member of Parliament Damian Collins said that unpublished evidence from an investigation by The Sunday Times newspaper shows that Issa Hayatou of Cameroon and Jacques Anouma of the Ivory Coast were paid US$1.5 million to vote for Qatar. The Gulf nation beat the United States in December in the final round of voting for the right to host the 2022 tournament.

The allegations were made in the Culture, Media and Sport Committee of the House of Commons, which is looking at England's failed bid for the 2018 World Cup as part of a wider inquiry into soccer governance.

improper conduct

The committee also heard from the former head of England's bid, who described the conduct of Jack Warner, Nicolas Leoz, Ricardo Teixeira and Worawi Makudi in the 2018 contest as "improper and unethical".

In Zurich, FIFA President Sepp Blatter said he will ask for evidence of the claims made in the committee hearing and forward any allegations to the FIFA ethics committee.

"I cannot say they are all angels or they are all devils," he said of the executive members.

"We must have the evidence, and then we will act immediately against all those (who) would be in breach of the ethical code rules," Blatter added.

The bidding contest was rocked ahead of the December vote by an undercover investigation by The Sunday Times that led to the suspension of two of FIFA's 24 executive committee members.

guilty of soliciting

Amos Adamu of Nigeria was found guilty by FIFA's ethics court of soliciting bribes from undercover reporters, while Reynald Temarii of Tahiti was banned for breaching rules on confidentiality and loyalty.

Some of the British newspaper's evidence was never published and it was sent to legislators on Monday to be made public using parliamentary privilege.

"The Sunday Times' submission, and this is to be published by us later, claims that US$1.5 million was paid to FIFA executive committee members Issa Hayatou and Jacques Anouma, who went on to vote for Qatar," Collins said.

Citing the evidence, Collins claimed that Qatar employed a middleman to arrange deals with African members to secure their votes.

The session then heard from David Triesman, who resigned as chairman of England's Football Association and its 2018 bid team last May - seven months before the vote - after being secretly recorded by a tabloid newspaper making unproven claims that Spain and Russia set up a bribery scam to influence referees at the 2010 World Cup.

Triesman - a member of the House of Lords - made the allegations about Warner, Leoz, Teixeira and Makudi to the committee.

He claimed that Warner - a FIFA vice-president and CONCACAF president from Trinidad and Tobago - asked for about US$4.1 million to build an education centre in Trinidad and for about US$820,000 to buy Haiti's World Cup TV rights.

Triesman also said that Leoz, of Paraguay, asked for an honorary knighthood, while Makudi of Thailand allegedly wanted to receive money from English TV for them to broadcast a planned exhibition against the country.

Triesman claimed that Teixeira, a Brazilian, asked him to "come and tell me what you have got for me".

"These were some of the things that were put to me personally, sometimes in the presence of others, which in my view did not represent proper and ethical behaviour on the part of members of the executive committee," Triesman said.