2018 FIFA World Cup: FIFA to Release Controversial Bidding Details for 2018 and 2011 Games in Limited Scope
A report on the bidding for the 2018 and 2022 World Cup games may soon be available for public scrutiny–in a limited scope–after FIFA revisits the issue.
FIFA voted to revisit the bids and release a portion of the report, which was produced by the U.S. lawyer Michael Garcia, NPR reported.
But Garcia has been lobbying for the release of the full confidential report, which is about 430 pages long, and resigned on Thursday.
In a statement, Garcia said soccer's governing body was not going to change the policing of its ethics.
The issue at hand is an investigation about whether or not Russia and Qatar, who won the bids to be hosts, bribed their way into winning. FIFA said in a statement that though they found irregularities, nothing about the bidding process was illegal.
"Viewed as a whole – and purely on the basis of the relevant inquiry report – it is clear that the irregularities determined thus far are not of an extent that would lead to the bidding process as a whole being qualified as significantly illegal or in contravention of the Statutes," FIFA said.
FIFA president Sepp Blatter equated the incident to a crisis and said the unity of the governing body was responsible for overcoming the crisis.
Blatter said there were no legal grounds to revoke the decision to award the bids to Russia and Qatar, according to the Associated Press.
But Blatter also said that the portions of the report that will be revealed to the public can only be released after the investigations into five people are complete.
They will be released "in an appropriate form once the ongoing procedures against individuals are concluded," he said.
The original decision to award both bids was in 2010.
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