With FIFA's already tarnished
reputation taking a beating, it
reached out to lawyer Michael Garcia, a
respected former U.S. Attorney, to investigate.
But
when Garcia was finished, FIFA sat on his findings, saying his 430-page
report couldn't be published and instead putting out only a summary.
That
cleared Russia and Qatar of major wrongdoing. It also upset Garcia and
did nothing to allay suspicions that FIFA must have something to hide.
Garcia resigned in protest this week, delivering a parting blow at
FIFA's ''lack of leadership.''
That,
in turn, upped pressure on FIFA to reverse course. It did so Friday at a
meeting of its governing executive committee after what one
participant, Domenico Scala, described as an ''animated discussion.''
The 25 voting members agreed the report, redacted with names taken out,
can be published ... in good time.
Here's a look at the key points of that decision, which FIFA President Sepp Blatter said was unanimous.
WHY THE U-TURN? FIFA executives
seem to have decided that whatever is in Garcia's report can't be as bad
as the hammering they were getting for not releasing it.
Since
his re-election in 2011 - unopposed after bribery allegations took out
his challenger - Blatter has championed a reform process to make the
organization he has led for 16 years more credible. That effort,
however, was being shredded by the secrecy surrounding what Blatter now
calls ''this famous Garcia report'' and the legalese FIFA employed to
try to justify why it couldn't be published.
''This
World Cup awarding in 2010 has had so much drama and had such an impact
on people that they now want to know what exactly happened,'' executive
committee member Theo Zwanziger said Friday. ''The fallout from not
publishing is worse than transparency.''
---
WHAT
HAPPENS NEXT? More waiting. Before he resigned, Garcia launched
prosecutions against five people, three of them still serving on the
executive committee, for alleged wrongdoing in the World Cup campaigns.
That includes suspicions some of them might have taken or asked for
gifts and favors from bidding nations.
FIFA
says those investigations must be concluded before Garcia's report can
be published. That could take a long while, years even, because anyone
found guilty could exhaust multiple appeals.
Blatter said FIFA is
trying to speed the process, telling its ethics committee handling the
probes ''to take more lawyers or whatever they need.''---
WHAT'S
IN THE REPORT? That's still the big question. Only a few people have
read it. One of those is FIFA ethics judge Joachim Eckert. He said he
didn't see any smoking gun that would justify stripping Qatar and Russia
of their World Cups. Irregularities in the bidding process were ''only
of very limited scope'' and ''far from reaching any threshold that would
require returning to the bidding process,'' he said in his 42-page
summary.
And that might have been the end
of this saga - at least that is what some at FIFA hoped - if Garcia
hadn't subsequently objected. He said Eckert misrepresented his
findings. That, in turn, reopened the question: What exactly did Garcia
find out and was it so damaging that FIFA would rather sweep dirt under
the carpet?
FIFA now has
decided it better to let the public judge. Garcia's report will be
published with names redacted, ''in an appropriate form,'' FIFA said.
---
WHAT
OF RUSSIA AND QATAR? Unless some major new evidence of wrongdoing turns
up somewhere, they seem certain to keep their World Cups. The votes
FIFA executives cast in Zurich won't be re-opened, and preparations
continue.
''There is no
reason to say that our decisions were wrong. So we will go on sticking
to our decisions,'' Blatter said. ''There must be huge upheaval, new
elements must come to the fore, in order to change this.''
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