Friday, December 25, 2015

FIFA, Blatter and the great Andrew Jennings

Don't miss the last documentary by BBC journalist Andrew Jennings about FIFA and corruption. Jennings explains how his long investigative work has been finally vindicated by the recent public exposure of corruption at FIFA, and convincingly compares the governance of global soccer to the Mafia. This is what the excellent web page "Play the Game" has to say about Jennings programme:
"The BBC today took a little wrap off what investigative journalist Andrew Jennings’ latest Panorama show, airing on BBC tonight, includes.
As observers had already guessed after the U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch released the latest, superseding, indictment into FIFA on Thursday, the U.S. authorities now also have an eye on FIFA president Sepp Blatter, writes the BBC.
According to the BBC, the U.S. authorities have documents that could compromise Blatter’s denial of wrongdoing in relation to the ISL scheme through which FIFA officials received more than 100 million euro in bribes from sports marketing company ISL for World Cup rights deals during the 1990’s.
In a letter obtained by the FBI, former FIFA president João Havelange writes that Blatter had “full knowledge of all activities” and was “always apprised to them”, writes The Guardian.
In May 2013, FIFA’s adjudicatory arm of the ethics committee cleared Blatter of wrong-doing in relation to the ISL affair. He may have been "clumsy" but his conduct "could not be classified in any way as misconduct with regard to any ethics rules," stated the FIFA report at the time.
A set of rather extensive reforms was presented to the FIFA executive committee on Dec 3, the same day that Swiss authorities made a second set of arrests and another 16 FIFA officials were indicted by the U.S. Attorney General’s office making the total number of defendants reach 27."

No comments:

Post a Comment