19 December 2014
FIFA says it's releasing the Garcia Report. Cause for celebration & a new commitment to transparency? No way.
So FIFA and the Executive Committee decide to release the Garcia Report in a very random act of what the spin doctors tell us is akin to a Damascene conversion to transparency and accountability.
But wait. Typical of FIFA, there’s a sting in the tail.
They’re teasing us.
What they’ve actually done is give a little lift of the veil of secrecy with a heavily qualified vague commitment to release a “legally appropriate” version of the Garcia Report with redactions - once the investigation is complete.
Just when everyone gets a bit excited, they also state that there are no legal grounds to re-visit the decision on the 2018 or 2022 tournaments.
This is despite the fact that one bidding team (Spain/Portgual) did not rate a mention at all in Eckert’s summary report, and another bidding team, the Russians, threw out their computers. Apparently no-one amongst the 135 million or so people in Russia can figure out how to retrieve documents, emails and text messages – have they thought of asking Edward Snowden for help? But it gets better: the new head of the Ethics Committee, Swiss Cornel Borbely, thinks Russia and their computers-sent-to-Siberia are all hunky-dory – even while coming down hard on one of the few people in the entire Bid process who told it like it is, Harold Mayne-Nicholls of Chile.
Then there’s the matter of redactions for ‘confidentiality’ of the 75 witnesses. Not all of them, of course; just the 73 who were not selectively and shamefully singled-out already by Eckert, FIFA and their advisers for the sole purpose of denigration and demeaning.
“The worst thing you can do in the FIFA world is speak. It’s even worse to speak out,” I write here.
It would be interesting to know whether the five members of the Executive Committee with a conflict of interest in this issue – Angel Maria Villar Llona (Spain), Michel d’Hooghe (Belgium), Vitaly Mutko (Russia), Sunil Gulati (USA) and Moya Dodd (Australia) – took part in this discussion and decision. As they’re all from bidding nations in 2018/2022, they ought not to have.
FIFA’s decision is nothing to get excited about. It is accountability on the ‘never never’ and should not be tolerated by the football community and civil society.