Qatar 2022 Goes on Attack as Latest Corruption Allegations Hit

Qatar World Cup organizers have gone on the offensive for the first time, issuing their strongest denial about allegations that former FIFA executive Mohamed Bin Hammam paid bribes to secure votes for the Gulf state’s bid.

Over the past three weeks, the British newspaper has accused the Qatari, a former FIFA presidential candidate, of using secret slush funds to make payments totaling more than $5m to secure votes from African football officials.

The newspaper published fresh revelations yesterday – Read here

It claims FIFA was warned that Qatar represented a "high risk" of a terrorist attack in a report written by its security consultant André Pruis and reveals how FIFA’s former security director Chris Eaton, who was probing alleged corruption in Qatar’s bid, was lured to Qatar to head the International Centre for Sport Security. Read here

The Sunday Times also charges that former bid chief Hassan Al-Thawadi, now secretary general of Qatar 2022’s delivery and legacy authority, had closer links with Bin Hammam than the bid has admitted in the past. Read here

It has also emerged that England 2018's World Cup bid is under FIFA investigation over a payment of £35,000 ($59,400) made by the English FA to lay on a gala dinner for Caribbean Football Union officials in early 2010.

German football legend Franz Beckenbauer, who was handed a 90-day ban for failing to cooperate with FIFA's probe into possible corruption in the 2018/2022 World Cup bidding race has now said he will aid the investigation.

Qatar's Strong Rebuttal

In a 1158-word statement that surfaced late Saturday, an apparent attempt to soften the impact of the latest wave of allegations in the newspaper printed hours later, Qatar 2022 goes on the attack, labelling the series of allegations as "baseless and riddled with innuendo designed to tarnish the reputation of Qatar’s 2022 bid".

Qatar World Cup organisers say the charges "do not implicate our bid. They are instead a series of tenuous links that attempt to assume guilt by association".

"The timing of the release of these allegations is no accident, falling in the same week as our interviews with [FIFA’s ethics investigator] Michael Garcia and a week before meetings of the FIFA Executive Committee and the 2014 FIFA Congress in Brazil," the statement said. The US lawyer has spent 18 months investigation corruption allegations linked to the nine 2018 and 2022 bidding nations.

Earlier this week Garcia told the FIFA Congress that he had seen the "vast majority" of material that had been puoblished by the Sunday Times. The newspaper disputes this. Garcia said he welcomes any additional information to help with his investigation, with his report due at the end of July.

The worst-case scenario for Qatar is that it is stripped of the World Cup and a revote is called for. But concrete evidence that would survive any legal challenge would be needed for that to happen, which seems unlikely.

"It should be clear that these leaks are not an attempt to shine light on the 2018/2022bidding process," the statement went on, saying they were "a flagrant attempt to prejudice an ongoing independent investigation".

"Certainly, if the source of these leaks were genuinely concerned with the evidence, they would have provided the leaked documents to Mr Garcia, as he requested, instead of offering them to the media."

Qatar 2022 said it had fully co-operated with Garcia’s bid probe: "Our officials complied with requests to be interviewed and with all requests for documentation and answers. We have nothing to hide."

It said aggressive marketing had been an integral part of successful bids to host major international sporting events. With the tiny gas-rich nation up against more established footballing nations – Australia, USA, Japan and South Korea – the Qatari bid "had to work harder than anyone else for our bid to succeed. We knocked on more doors, made more phone calls and took more meetings than our competitors".

"We travelled the world explaining in vivid detail why, in our view, a World Cup in Qatar made more sense than anywhere else," the statement said.

"But in every aspect of the 2018/2022 FIFA World Cup bidding process, we strictly adhered to FIFA’s rules and regulations."

Clarifying Bin Hammam Links

Qatar 2022 also commented on the Sunday Times accusation that the bid committee had enjoyed strong and beneficial links with Bin Hammam. Qatar's former bid CEO Al Thawadi was in Sao Paulo this week attendingthe FIFA Congress. Accompanying him was Nasser Al Khater. Lookingand sounding cheerful, Al Thawadi did not comment on the corruptioncrisis engulfing Qatar's World Cup.

The statement said: "Mr. Bin Hammam is from Qatar, but he was not a member of Qatar’s bid team.

"In fact, we have never denied we had a relationship with Mr Bin Hammam. As a member of the football world and as member of Qatari society, he often crossed paths with influential Qatari citizens, including members of our bid team."

Qatar 2022 said they had had to present their plans to the FIFA ExCo member "and convince him that our bid was the right choice for the 2022 FIFA World Cup". As he headed the AFC and was a voting member "it was important for us to maintain a working relationship with him. None of this was improper".

The statement concludes by underlining how the desert nation aims to use the 2022 World Cup as a catalyst for change: "We are already constructing three stadiums and by the end of the year two more will be in development. Our country has demonstrated its support, spending more than $23 billion on transport infrastructure projects alone. And to be clear - we will do this as we advance worker welfare within Qatar."

Written byMark Bisson

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