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EDITOR IN CHIEF- ABDULLAH BIN SALIM AL SHUEILI

Fifa Ethics Committee still investigating ‘hundreds’ of cases, says Borbely

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MANAMA: Ousted Fifa Ethics investigator Cornel Borbely said on Wednesday his committee had been looking at “several hundred” cases of possible wrongdoing, some involving senior officials, before he was replaced by the body’s ruling council.


The Fifa Council decided on Tuesday not to renew the mandates of Borbely and chief ethics judge Hans-Joachim Eckert, who had led the clean-up attempt at world football’s governing body, instead nominating replacements for the pair.


Borbely and Eckert labelled the move “de facto the end of reforms” at Fifa and said it was a setback for attempts to clean up its operations.


Several dozen soccer officials, mainly from Latin America, were indicted in the United States in 2015 on corruption-related charges, sparking the worst crisis in Fifa’s history.


Among officials now banned from the sport are former Fifa president Sepp Blatter and Secretary-General Jerome Valcke.


Fifa President Gianni Infantino was also investigated by the Ethics Committee, but he was cleared in August 2016.


Speaking at a news conference held close to the venue for Fifa’s Congress, Borbely said the move was a “setback for the fight against corruption” with the know-how and experience in the cases concerned likely to be lost.


“We investigated several hundred cases and several hundred are still pending and ongoing at the moment,” Borbely said, adding that he could not comment on cases still under way.


Fifa said on Tuesday that it has nominated Colombian investigator Maria Claudia Rojas as the new head of the committee’s investigatory chamber, which Borbely had headed. It also nominated Vassilios Skouris of Greece, a former president of the European Court of Justice, as head of the adjudicatory chamber that Eckert had run.


The nominations of Rojas and Skouris, along with other proposed heads of committees, will be put to a vote of the full Fifa Congress on Thursday.


The changes to the Ethics Committee follow the resignation last year of reform and compliance chief Domenico Scala, who had argued that the independent committees had been undermined by the changes made by Fifa president Infantino. Infantino denied that accusation.


Borbely said they had not been officially informed by Fifa of the end of their mandates and had found out only from the media. The Swiss investigator said the manner of their dismissal meant there would be no transition period.


“We worked well on a very high level with a huge volume of cases,” said Borbely.


“There was no need to change the Ethics Committee. The only conclusion can be that this was politically intended.”


The pair said that the Fifa administration had not interfered in their work prior to deciding to remove them.


Borbely and Eckert remain with an active mandate until the end of Thursday’s Congress. — Reuters


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