Gotcha: Infantino revealed as being as bent as those he replaced at Fifa

Now at last, as the latest revelations of Fifa outrages breaks, at least one English paper has taken up the tale.   For the Guardian has revealed what those of us following the story were starting to realise: that the Ethics Committee which Gianni Infantino was so anxious to curtail, was investigating Gianni Infantino for repeated malpractice.

It appears that the prosecutor Cornel Borbely, (one of the Swiss people that Infantino said were making Fifa nationally unbalanced) was investigating Infantino and Fifa general secretary Fatma Samoura, for influencing the election in March of the President of the Confederation of African Football.

It is said that Infantino and Samoura promised FA presidents that they could “accelerate the payment of Fifa ‘development money’ to their  associations if the presidents voted for their selected man Ahmad Ahmad.  (Ahmad himself was under investigation for allegedly seeking money from the former president of the Asian Football Confederation Mohammed bin Hammam, who was banned by Fifa in 2012.)

This is of course exactly the sort of Fifa procedure that has brought it into total disrepute over the years.  Infantino is also accused of working to remove other people who have not supported him and his preferred candidates for key positions, and Cornel Borbely was also investigating these breaches of ethics.  Hence the ethics committee had to be “reformed” (Fifa speak for putting Infantino’s men in place).

And of course we need to remember that Infantino only came to power because it was the Ethics Committee that banned Sepp Blatter from holding further office, in December 2015.

Investigation into Infantino began almost as soon as he took office in 2016 and it now seems clear that Infantino has been plotting his revenge from the start, removing the names of possible candidates for various post from the official lists of candidates, including of course the candidates for the Ethics Committee.

As we have always argued on Untold, both the British government, and the Football Association which runs football in England are implicated in all this, because tax payers money is given to the FA by the state, and the FA gives some of that, plus its support, to Fifa.

Indeed as the Guardian reveals today, David Gill, the ex-Manchester United chief executive, is paid $300,000 a year along with amazing daily allowances for attending meetings.

He was part of the gang that approved the removal of Eckert and Borbely from the Ethics Committee, without any protest and without demanding any explanation.  I would argue that to do his job properly (and given his gigantic salary) the very least Gill should have done was to ask exactly why Eckert and Borbely were being removed while they were doing so much to sort out the corruption within Fifa.  Apparently he said and did nothing.

What’s more it was widely acknowledged (as reported in the earlier articles above) that Eckert and Borbely were working on a huge range of corruption cases.  Thus to remove them suddenly part way through this work was nonsense and of course brought into question the integrity of a supposedly independent part of Fifa, charged with the job of investigating Fifa.  And indeed the investigation into Infantino has (according to the European newspapers which report Fifa activities with a relish we can only admire from afar) now stopped.

Meanwhile other “reforms” have been going on.  Miguel Maduro, chair of the independent governance committee, and director of the global governance programme at the European University Institute in Florence, has been fired from Fifa after eight months in the job.  The three key members of the committee then resigned in protest.

This came after the governance committee ruled that Russia’s deputy prime minister, Vitaly Mutko, could not be a member of the Fifa council, because of Fifa’s own rules separating politics from football.  (You may recall the off quoted rule that threatens the ejection of a country from Fifa if the government gets involved in football – which is what English politicians cite in final desperation when asked why they don’t sort the appalling FA out).

Infantino protested about this citing, the need to bring in Mutko because of the Gazprom sponsorship of the Russian world cup.

Maduro also acted to stop the advancement of Qatari football official Saoud al-Mohannadi, after he was charged with corruption.  As in the Mutko case Infantino wanted his man on board because of the sponsorship of Qatar Airways of the 2022 world cup in … Qatar.  Oh, what a coincidence.

Maduro’s statement made to the Guardian newspaper lays the situation out fair and square.

“I am now convinced that only outside pressure, perhaps from the US authorities or the European Union, can secure meaningful reform of Fifa.   Without it, Fifa won’t reform; its problem is systemic. The fundamental problem is that the power is really important to people within Fifa, so they have a problem accepting independent governance and scrutiny.  If you have such a systemic problem, then this is an environment for corruption to emerge.”

Thus the coup that Infantino has executed against the Ethics Committee effectively stops investigations into wrong doing in relation to the Russian and Qatar world cups and incidentally also into suggestions of wrong doing by officials within the German bid for the 2006 World Cup.

It is terrific news that at last the British press veto on Fifa issues has been broken, although the fact remains that Infantino is still in power, and his coup at the Ethics Committee has been successful.  Just as bad, the FA remains in power in England, endlessly supporting Fifa and handing over tax payers money given to it via the British government, to Fifa.

So one step forwards by the Guardian, amidst several steps back.   At least we can say that the football following public in much of Europe are not being kept as totally in the dark as they are in England.

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