To lose one FIFA president may be considered unfortunate. To lose two in the space of a few months smacks of carelessness. Apologies to fans of Oscar Wilde for the adulteration of one of his most pithy sayings but it might well be used to characterise last week’s ruling by FIFA’s ethics committee – one of the most momentous and controversial since the body was first set up – to let Gianni Infantino off the hook.
In other words, was the threat of FIFA’s reputation taking a potentially terminal hit by suspending Infantino so soon after the demise of Sepp Blatter too great a risk to take just at the time when the organisation’s highly paid well-orchestrated public relations machine is trying so desperately to restore trust and credibility?
How else can one account for why Infantino got off scot-free when his conduct so clearly pointed to a breach of ethics, especially when compared to some of the punishments meted out to a raft of previous miscreants for seemingly far less serious cases of misconduct?
Actually, there is another explanation but it is equally unpalatable. Ethics officials may not like to hear it but there is a growing body of opinion that believes they were simply too cowardly to throw the book at Infantino, that protecting their jobs was of far greater importance than doing the right thing.
Ever since that sneakily tabled statute change at the FIFA congress in Mexico City, where members of the new ruling Council were given carte blanche to dismiss members of independent bodies, the fear factor has set in. Either resign (as Domenico Scala did) or have the rug pulled from under your feet if you refuse to toe the party line. In one fell swoop, the game changed overnight.
No wonder ethics officials felt so uncomfortable about the Infantino case. “There was no pressure put on us to decide the case in favour of Mr. Infantino,” ethics prosecutor Robert Torres pleaded in a conference call a couple of hours after the verdict. Who was he trying to kid?
Rarely, if ever, has one single ruling wrecked so much of the hard work that went into the reform process. The inconsistencies and double-standards of last Friday’s exoneration of Infantino screamed out of every facet of the verdict and it will be interesting to hear the reaction – if we ever do – of chief investigator Cornel Borbely who, because he is of the same nationality as Infantino, had to stay out of the case but whose own credibility is surely at serious risk.
If Borbely remains silent, it will be a tacit admission that he agrees with his colleagues’ far-reaching judgement. If he disagrees, which several well-informed sources believe is the case, he should express that disagreement by resigning. Otherwise any integrity he enjoys risks being damaged irrevocably. Otherwise, too, the next hapless official his department goes after and slaps with a sanction could justifiably point to the Infantino case and ask, ‘is my punishment justified by comparison?’
Whatever stance Borbely takes, the committee which he and German judge Hans-Joachim Eckert jointly head has lost all semblance of public confidence in its workings. Even if ethics officials really couldn’t pin any breaches on Infantino, it seems incredulous that taking private planes paid for by third parties is deemed more reasonable behaviour than, say, asking for (but never receiving) an internship for a relative. Which is what Harold Mayne-Nicholls, who showed naivety and rank poor judgement but nothing worse, was punished for. A seven-year ban in fact, later reduced to three on appeal.
Everywhere you look, last week’s decision had “fudge” written all over it. It was only a few months ago, remember, that this very same ethics committee – with Borbely and Eckert at the helm – was banging the drum for transparency, persuading FIFA to allow it to lift the veil of secrecy on those who were under investigation but could not previously be named.
Yet the exact opposite happened in the case of Infantino with the media left in the dark and, for the first time anyone can remember, a verdict being announced before either preliminary or formal proceedings – the latter headed by Vanessa Allard of Trinidad and Tobago – had even been confirmed. Torres argued that under the rules ethics officials had “discretion” and every right to keep the investigation of Infantino under wraps. Others might counter it was a deliberate protective measure not afforded to previous cases.
What he didn’t explain, apart from saying the investigation had to be “unimpaired and independent”, was why this particular probe was cherry-picked in terms of media manipulation. Or the timing of the verdict, conveniently announced just as Infantino was waking up in Rio de Janeiro several thousand miles away and thus avoiding a media backlash. One wonders what Sepp Blatter, who goes to the Court of Arbitration of Sport later this month to contest his ban, will make of the way his successor has got away with it. One imagines the wily old fox will already be instructing his lawyers to use as much of the Infantino evidence as possible to his own advantage. He could do worse than argue that the ethics committee has become nothing more than a self-serving body, dishing out sanctions when it makes them look good; hiding behind artificial arguments when confronted by awkward cases that could bite them on the backside and endanger their own positions.
Let’s just go slightly deeper into those infamous flights Infantino took to visit Pope Francis at the Vatican, Vladimir Putin in Moscow and the Emir of Qatar. Ethics prosecutors ruled that because of “schedule changes” the FIFA president broke no rules and that the “benefits enjoyed by Mr. Infantino were not considered improper in the light of applicable FIFA rules and regulations.”
Really? So it was perfectly reasonable for one flight to be financed, even if it was subsequently paid back, by Vitaly Mutko, the Russian sports minister and chief 2018 World Cup organiser whose country is benefitting from hundreds of millions of Swiss francs from FIFA to stage the tournament. It was perfectly reasonable for another flight to be provided by a subsidiary of Russian state-owned energy firm Gazprom, a 2018 World Cup sponsor. It was perfectly reasonable to have taken up a similar offer for a trip to see the Pope, this time on an aircraft provided by Russian businessman Leon Semenenko, a personal friend of Infantino, and which had been bought two years earlier from Russian oligarch Alisher Usmanov. None of this apparently constituted conflict of interest. All of it placed Infantino sufficiently above suspicion not to be temporarily sanctioned. Draw your own conclusions.
Torres was at pains to explain that Infantino’s trip to the Pope was purely private. Hang on a minute. Doesn’t that make the use of a private jet offered by a third party all the more dodgy if Infantino was in fact not travelling on FIFA business?
If the official explanation surrounding the flights was highly questionable, the ethics committee’s argument that none of the other allegations thrown at Infantino represented breaches of the code was equally dubious.
Spare a thought for some of those 20-plus witnesses – FIFA staffers and senior officials – who were interviewed. Some of them had been fired for becoming whistleblowers yet that, we are told, was purely an “internal compliance issue” and had nothing to do with ethics. Talk about being hung out to dry.
The way in which Infantino hired his senior staff without due process was also deemed a compliance matter, as was his refusal to sign his $2 million contract. As were, perhaps most alarmingly of all, alleged attempts to delete the infamous Mexico recordings and comments Infantino allegedly made to colleagues boasting that complaints made against him had been thrown in the bin by ethics officials.
Compliance violations, of course, do not result in external investigations. Nor do they expose their subjects to prolonged disgrace and questions about their character and suitability. They may be serious but they invariably remain in-house. How convenient.
Amid persistent reports of a split over how to resolve the Infantino case, ethics committee sources have actually admitted they were worried about whether they had a strong enough case, that Infantino would perhaps have been able to quash their findings on appeal and that that they would thus lose face.
Yet by acting as they have, they have done more than just lose face. They have called into question their own integrity (when is a breach not a breach?) and exposed a gaping great hole in FIFA’s governance, unwittingly highlighting what is and is not acceptable behaviour.
In other words, if you are the person at the top you can act with as much impunity as you wish internally without committing any ethics violations and being taken to task. How many other democratic organisations operate in such a cavalier fashion? But then this is FIFA where realpolitik rules and normal standards of behaviour don’t apply.
If there is a silver lining, it is that having sailed so close to the wind, Infantino might take the view that a more modest, less contentious approach to the FIFA presidency is the best way forward in order to avoid unnecessary further scrutiny. Then again, having already denounced what he described as a “carefully orchestrated hysteria” in the media to undermine him, don’t bank on it.
Andrew Warshaw is chief correspondent of Insideworldfootball and was formerly Sports Editor of the European. Contact him at moc.l1714660528labto1714660528ofdlr1714660528owedi1714660528sni@w1714660528ahsra1714660528w.wer1714660528dna1714660528