The next step in the FIFA corruption investigation is extradition, whereby federal officials will attempt to bring suspects to the United States to face allegations they arranged bribes at meetings on U.S. soil, employed the U.S. banking system in conveying the bribes and created documents to cloak their activity.
Among the decisions allegedly sullied by corruption, US Attorney General, Lynch said, were the “sponsorship of the Brazilian national soccer team by a major U.S. sportswear company,” the 2011 FIFA presidential election and the placement of the 2010 World Cup.
Around 2004, bidding began for the opportunity to host the 2010 World Cup, which was ultimately awarded to South Africa, the first time the tournament would be held on the African continent. But even for this historic event, FIFA executives and others corrupted the process by using bribes to influence the hosting decision.
The South African Football Association called the allegations baseless and promised to challenge them. Spokesman Dominic Chimhavi added, “Those individuals that brought the World Cup to South Africa were men of high integrity. Men like the late President Nelson Mandela and our former President Thabo Mbeki.
The bidding process was never compromised.” Lynch spoke to reporters in New York hours after the Justice Department announced the unsealing of a 47-count indictment in federal court in Brooklyn that detailed charges against 14 people for racketeering, wire fraud and money laundering conspiracy.
The most serious are the racketeering charges, which allege that the officials turned soccer “into a criminal enterprise,” she said. A conviction could command a sentence of up to 20 years in prison, she said. FIFA announced shortly after Lynch’s news conference that it was banning 11 individuals from “football-related activities” as a result of the investigation.
Seven of them have already been arrested by Swiss authorities, while others on the list had previous indictments and guilty pleas unsealed Wednesday.
The list also included former presidents of CONCACAF and CONMEBOL, the governing bodies for soccer in North America and the Caribbean, and South America, respectively. “The charges are clearly related to football and are of such a serious nature that it was imperative to take swift and immediate action,” said Hans-Joachim Eckert, FIFA’s Ethics Committee chairman.
The complexity of the investigation Lynch described was evident by the federal officials accompanying her, including a U.S. attorney, FBI Director James Comey and Richard Weber, head of the IRS Criminal Investigation division. “This really is the World Cup of fraud, and today we are issuing FIFA a red card,” Weber said.
FIFA officials are accused of taking bribes totaling more than $150 million and in return providing “lucrative media and marketing rights” to soccer tournaments as kickbacks over the past 24 years. “The defendants fostered a culture of corruption and greed that created an uneven playing field for the biggest sport in the world,” Comey said in a statement. “Undisclosed and illegal payments, kickbacks and bribes became a way of doing business at FIFA.
” The indictment unsealed Wednesday “is the beginning of our work, not the end” of an effort to rid global soccer of corruption, said Kelly Currie, acting U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York.
In addition to the U.S. probe into corruption that Lynch earlier called “rampant, systemic and deep-rooted,” soccer’s powerful governing body also finds itself on the end of a Swiss investigation into World Cup bidding. Swiss authorities raided FIFA’s headquarters in Zurich on Wednesday, the same day they announced an investigation into the last two awarded World Cup bids — to Russia in 2018 and Qatar in 2022 — both of which have been under fire since they were announced in 2010.
CORRUPTION UNCOVERED
Corruption Uncovered - Exposing Corruption and Cover-Ups 