FIFA release Garcia report on 2018/2022 FIFA World Cup bids after leak – Update
June 27, 2017
The report investigating the bidding process for the 2018 and 2022 FIFA World Cups, awarded to Qatar and Russia in December 2010, has been officially released by FIFA following its leak to German newspaper Bild.
A statement late on Tuesday confirmed new chairpersons of FIFA’s independent Ethics Committee, Maria Claudia Rojas and Vassilios Skouris, have decided to publish the Garcia Report “for the sake of transparency”.
Former US prosecutor Michael Garcia was put in charge of scrutinising the double award by FIFA’s own ethics committee in 2012, following numerous allegations of corruption.
Upon delivering his report in September 2014, chairman of the ethics committee adjudication chamber Hans Joachim Eckert decided not to release the report to the public, and provided his own summation which cleared Russia and Qatar from any wrongdoing.
Garcia himself resigned from his investigative role on the committee in protest at the “erroneous representations of the facts and conclusion” of his report.
The 430-page document has led to FIFA bringing corruption charges against some of its own members.
You can read the whole report here.
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FIFA statement in full:
The new chairpersons of the independent Ethics Committee, Maria Claudia Rojas of the investigatory chamber and Vassilios Skouris of the adjudicatory chamber, have decided to publish the Report on the Inquiry into the 2018/2022 FIFA World Cup Bidding Process (the so-called “Garcia Report”).
This had been called for on numerous occasions by FIFA President Gianni Infantino in the past and also supported by the FIFA Council since its meeting in Mexico City in May 2016. Despite these regular requests, it is worth noting that the former chairpersons of the Ethics Committee, Cornel Borbély and Hans-Joachim Eckert, had always refused to publish it.
The Ethics Committee will meet in its full composition under the new chairpersons for the first time next week, and it was already planned to use this opportunity to discuss the publication of the report. However, as the document has been illegally leaked to a German newspaper, the new chairpersons have requested the immediate publication of the full report (including the reports on the Russian and US bid teams, which were conducted by Mr Borbély alone) in order to avoid the dissemination of any misleading information.
For the sake of transparency, FIFA welcomes the news that this report has now been finally published.
