FIFA will never publish the £6mn ($9.7mn) report into alleged corruption in the bidding to stage the 2018 and 2022 World Cup tournaments, according to report in the Sunday Times newspaper.
The football body’s top ethics judge, Hans Joachim-Eckert told the newspaper that he would personally ensure that the 350-page report, along with the 200,000 pages of evidence, would never be published.
The German judge said that he and his deputy would be the only people to read the report, and said that FIFA rules prohibited him from making the report public to anyone, including FIFA’s president, Sepp Blatter, and all its 27 executive members.
The vow of silence provoked fury from campaigners who have sought to clean up FIFA and increase transparency at the Swiss-based footballing body.
John Whittingdale, chairman of the UK’s Commons culture, media and sport committee, said: “The one thing we’ve always been told by FIFA is that there would be a proper investigation and we should wait for the Garcia report. But if th Garcia report is going to be buried so that we have no idea what the conclusions are, it will leave the reputation of FIFA in pieces. It confirms what we have long suspected, that all FIFA is interested in is burying this whole matter and sweeping the evidence under the carpet.”
The Sunday Times published a series of stories earlier this year claiming that Mohamed Bin Hammam, a former FIFA executive member for Qatar, made payments totalling $5mn to football bosses to secure support for the Qatari bid.
The official Qatar World Cup bid has always strongly denied that Bin Hammam was working on its behalf.
