FIFA can no longer protect itself, says ex-investigator

More secrets yet to be revealed, says Nicholas Davidson.

LAUSANNE: The US-led investigations into corruption at FIFA have pierced the veil of secrecy that protected football’s top power-brokers and more dominoes can be expected to fall, said a former investigator on the governing body’s ethics committee.

Nicholas Davidson, a prominent lawyer and honorary president of New Zealand’s football association, resigned from his role on FIFA’s investigatory chamber before Swiss police arrested seven senior officials in Zurich last week.

While defending the work of the ethics committee and its “fearless” personnel, Davidson said the governing body’s lack of transparency had set it up to fail.

“It strikes me from my observations of the people who work in the business, and I’m talking about ordinary employees, [they are] hugely skilful, talented people, and dedicated,” said Davidson in a phone interview from Christchurch on Friday. “Somewhere above that there is a veneer of people who make decisions who have the ability to intercept or be involved in some way in the vast money that goes around. Now that layer, that veneer, has been pierced.”

Davidson stressed he left FIFA due to a change in his professional life and not because of his work there or the unfolding scandal.

However, he said he nearly quit only months after starting work in earnest last October, following the departure of FIFA’s independent investigator Michael Garcia.

The former US attorney submitted a report of his 18-month investigation into the controversial bidding process for the 2018 and 2022 World Cups, which are now the subject of a probe by Swiss authorities.

Updates on $10 million ‘bribe’

Senior South African officials, including then president Thabo Mbeki, approved the $10 million payment that US authorities describe as a bribe to host the 2010 World Cup, local media reported on Friday.

A US indictment last week said the cash was paid to former FIFA executive Jack Warner to secure the right to hold the tournament in 2010 — one of a slew of recent allegations of corruption at football’s world governing body.

But South Africa has rejected the accusation, saying the $10 million payment was an honest donation to support football among the “African diaspora” in the Caribbean.  

Published in The Express Tribune, June 6^th, 2015.

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