By Paul Nicholson
August 10 – FIFA’s newly hired external PR teams went into overdrive at the weekend with a stunning assault, led by FIFA’s new-found media luvvie Alasdair Bell, the organisation’s deputy general secretary, on the FIFA reform process led Basel criminal law professor Mark Pieth (pictured) as being a useless waste of money.
In a hard-hitting rebuttal of Bell’s comments in a FIFA statement, Pieth says Bell is “distorting facts drastically”.
Bell was responding to an article in Sonntags-Blick headlined ‘2.5 million francs for nothing’. Bell’s delving into the FIFA reform archive – Pieth was chairman of the FIFA reform commission from 2011 to 2013 – was a clumsy attempt at deflecting attention away from the criminal charges and debate around the Swiss special prosecutor opening a criminal case against FIFA’s president Gianni Infantino.
It was an outburst from Bell that comes almost surreally after his press conference last week where he delivered a withering and contemptuous attack on the Swiss justice system. This was coupled with an attempt to deflect attention away from the criminal investigation by pointing the finger at unnamed anti-Infantino trouble-makers.
It appears paranoia has taken over FIFA’s Zurich HQ where the walls appear to have ears and truth, fact and justice all have different dictionary definitions depending on who you are supporting on FIFA’s slippery pole.
“Mr. Pieth and the Basel Institute on Governance have received millions in fees from FIFA under the direction of Sepp Blatter,” Bell said.
“The fact is that Mr Pieth and his associates may have made millions out of advising FIFA on ‘good governance’ but what real difference did they ever make?” he adds. “The organisation basically stayed the same and it required the intervention of the US Department of Justice and the involvement of new leaders before any real reforms were introduced.”
The questions of cost of the reform process under Blatter’s administration have been raised before. That it should suddenly come up again is something of a sideshow and one that Pieth has been quick to raise as such.
Bell astonishingly concluded his assault on Pieth integrity credentials saying: “So, the next time Mr Pieth and his associates comment in public about the new FIFA and Gianni Infantino, they might also care to point out, in the interests of transparency and ‘good governance‘, how much money they made out of the old FIFA and Sepp Blatter.”
Pieth in his own withering response points out that “the reform process went on for two years, involving a Reform Committee of twelve member meeting at regular intervals. The members had to be flown in from countries as far as Canada, the US and Argentina. They had to be paid salaries for their preparation and attendance.” He also points out that aa secretariat was run by the Basel Institute and that the money was not paid to him but to a University of Basel fund “for my time”. He notes that the organisation – under Infantino and Bell – spent $2.4 million on judicial bodies in 2018 alone.
However, where Pieth pulls apart Bell’s dis-ingenuity most convincingly is over the “impression” Bell gives that the “officials in the Audit or the Ethics Committee could have been dependent on the Blatter administration is rather bizarre, if one considers the first thing they did was to impeach Blatter and Platini.”
He also lays the blame of the problems of the 2012 reform process unequivocally at the door of Infantino and UEFA. “That the reform process got stuck in 2012 is solely the doing of Infantino and the UEFA, who disliked introducing terms of office and independent Vetting Committee.”
Pieth concludes: “Overall I believe FIFA is panicking in the face of the criminal investigation initiated against its president. If FIFA dislikes the Swiss legal system to this extent it may consider moving to a location with a legal order more conducive to its ways of doing business.”
With Bell so interested in past FIFA costs, a more relevant question might be how much are these new PR consultants costing that you have briefing the media on the Free-Gianni campaign?
Further reading:
Bell tolls for FIFA and Infantino questioners as he argues the case that there is no case
Are FIFA Ethics’ teeth in un-repairable decay?
Did FIFA and Infantino just pull up the drawbridge as criminal investigators circle?
Contact the writer of this story at moc.l1714180711labto1714180711ofdlr1714180711owedi1714180711sni@n1714180711osloh1714180711cin.l1714180711uap1714180711