Qatar 2020 corruption claims intensify

Fresh accusations rain down on disgraced official Bin Hammam.

LONDON: Qatar faced growing pressure over its hosting of the 2022 World Cup on Sunday after fresh allegations over the role disgraced former top football official Mohammed bin Hammam played in its bid.

Last week, Britain’s Sunday Times newspaper said it had obtained millions of emails, documents and bank transfers showing that Bin Hammam paid over $5 million from slush funds to win support in the bidding process.

Now it has published new stories based on the same information which claim to detail Bin Hammam’s moves in the weeks before the ballot as he sought to boost Qatar’s bid.

One Sunday Times story claimed Bin Hammam was invited to visit Russia’s then Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to discuss ‘bilateral relations in sport’ at the end of October 2010.

This was just over a month before Russia and Qatar won the bids.

Another alleged that Bin Hammam helped arrange talks on a major gas deal between Thailand and Qatar during a visit to Doha by the president of the Football Association of Thailand, Worawi Makudi, in August 2010, involving one of his advisers.

Worawi was quoted by the Sunday Times as denying that the gas deal came in exchange for supporting Qatar to host the World Cup.

Bin Hammam was formerly on Fifa’s executive committee but resigned in 2012, shortly before being banned for life from football administration by Fifa’s ethics committee.

In response to the Sunday Times latest allegations, the Qatar 2022 Supreme Committee for Delivery and Legacy insisted in a new statement that, “Qatar has won the bid on its merits and we are confident that at the end of the appropriate process, the award of the 2022 World Cup to Qatar will stand.”

Published in The Express Tribune, June 9^th, 2014.

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