FIFA widens access to Ethics Committee report

​FIFA has confirmed its Audit and Compliance Committee will see the full report into the 2018 and 2022 World Cup bidding process.

Last week, the findings of Michael Garcia’s investigation were published, but the American prosecutor was critical of what he felt were “erroneous representations of fact” within the report.

The document cleared both Russia and Qatar – hosts of the 2018 and 2022 World Cups – of any wrongdoing, but claimed there had been “various incidents which might have occurred are not suited to compromise the integrity of the FIFA World Cup 2018/2022 bidding process as a whole”.

Garcia subsequently appealed, leading to FIFA president Sepp Blatter lodging a criminal complaint over potential misconduct to the Attorney General of Switzerland.

On Thursday – a week after the original report was published – Garcia and Hans-Joachim Eckert, chairman of FIFA’s adjudicatory chamber, released a statement confirming more of Garcia’s report will be made available to Audit and Compliance Committee, and potentially the Executive Committee.

It read: “Both chairmen agreed that it is of major importance that the FIFA Executive Committee has the information necessary to evaluate which steps are required based on the work done by the FIFA Ethics Committee.

“In order to achieve this, the chairman of the FIFA Audit and Compliance Committee will receive full copies of all reports of the investigatory chamber to fulfil his fiduciary and statutory duties and to determine how much of that information should be made available to the FIFA Executive Committee. He then shall take the steps necessary to do so.

“The chairmen also offered to answer any questions the chairman of the Audit and Compliance Committee and the Executive Committee might have.”