By Andrew Warshaw
June 8 – Asia’s top Olympic official has waded into the latest corruption claims over Qatar’s 2022 World Cup bid by blasting the allegations as being “racist” towards Arabs in general.
Qatar has vehemently denied all allegations of wrong-doing emphasising that it had won the 2022 vote fairly. Last weekend Britain’s Sunday Times sparked fresh controversy by alleging in an 11-page expose that former Qatari football supremo Mohamed bin Hammam paid more than $5 million to win support for the country’s bid.
The paper says it has even more claims to come, which may implicate Qatar further, but Sheikh Ahmad al-Sabah, highly influential Kuwaiti president of the Olympic Council of Asia and the Association of National Olympic Committees, strongly defended the 2022 hosts.
On the sidelines of the Extraordinary General Assembly of the OCA, he said: “We will confront all the racist moves and we will stand with Qatar, the 2022 World Cup bid will not be withdrawn.”
Those reported to have received payments include two of Sheikh Ahmad’s fellow members of the International Olympic Committee, African football boss Issa Hayatou and Lydia Nsekera of Burundi, who last year became the first woman ever elected to the FIFA executive committee.
Sheikh Ahmad said the West has viewed Arabs with racism for years in contrast to hardly any outcry over the situation in Brazil which is riven by crime, violence and abject poverty. “There are so many flaws in the Brazilian World Cup but we did not hear any of them speak about it,” he said.
FIFA’s ethics investigator, US lawyer Michael Garcia, met Qatari World Cup committee officials in Oman this week as part of his probe into whether there was corruption in the December 2010 ballot that awarded the 2018 World Cup to Russia and the 2022 tournament to Qatar.
He is to complete his report on Monday, the day before FIFA starts its annual congress in Sao Paulo, and deliver it to ethics chamber adjudicatory chairman, Hans-Joachim Eckert, in mid-July.
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