Bin Hammam steps down following ban

Ex-Asian football chief fed up with ‘trumped up charges’.

PARIS: Mohamed Bin Hammam on Monday announced that he had resigned from his roles on Fifa’s executive committee and as president of the Asian Football Confederation (AFC).

The Qatari told AFP in an emailed statement that he had stepped down from the positions 10 days after the ethics committee of football’s world governing body Fifa, launched a new probe into corruption claims against him.

Fifa responded to bin Hammam’s statement by saying it had received his resignation letter but stressed its ethics committee remained competent to make and maintain a judgment ‘even if a person resigns’.

The 63-year-old has been accused of trying to buy the result of a vote to the world governing body’s top job in 2011 and was banned by Fifa from all football activities. This ban was subsequently overturned by the Lausanne-based Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) in July due to what it called a lack of evidence over the corruption allegations.

Bin Hammam said he was fed up with what he said were ‘trumped up allegations’.

“For me, the decision by CAS, the highest independent authority in sports arbitration, that Fifa’s ban was unjustified is enough,” he said in the statement.



“This decision has now been confirmed by a new Investigatory Chamber of the Fifa Ethics Committee who failed to introduce any evidence in spite of spending tens of millions of dollars for an investigation.

“I do not want to spend any more of my life fighting trumped up allegations and to focus instead on my family and businesses. However, if further allegations are made I will, of course, defend myself in the same way that I did in the past.”

Published in The Express Tribune, December 19^th, 2012.