FIFA must release the full findings of the Garcia Report if they are to have any hope of restoring the organisation’s credibility or regaining the trust of the public, according to former vice-president of the organisation, Jim Boyce.
Michael Garcia, a former US Attorney General, was tasked by an independent FIFA ethics committee in July 2012 with leading an investigation into the bidding processes for both the 2018 World Cup, which was awarded to Russia, and the 2022 World Cup, which was awarded to Qatar.
The findings of the 430-page report were delivered in September 2014, but German judge Hans Joachim-Eckert, who was the chairman of the ethics committee’s adjudication chamber, blocked its full publication for legal reasons, and instead only made public his own judgments on the report in November of that year.
That led Garcia to resign the following month, calling Eckert’s summary of his findings "materially incomplete" with "erroneous representations of the facts and conclusions".
Boyce, who served as vice-president of FIFA for four years and was part of the executive committee who pledged to release the full transcript of the Garcia Report, is adamant that their commitment must now be fulfilled, and that FIFA should not be allowed to bury the full findings of the investigation.
“It was agreed that they couldn’t release it at that time because there were individuals being investigated and they had to be interviewed and dealt with by the ethics committee,” Boyce told HeraldSport. “But once that was done, then the Garcia Report was to be issued, and would come into the public domain. I am amazed that it doesn’t seem to be mentioned now at FIFA.
"I think the credibility of FIFA is something that has to be, and hopefully will be, improved. I’m not there now, and I know that there is a new council and a lot of new people there, but the Garcia report is something that was promised, and it’s up to the new FIFA council to make sure that once these individuals have been dealt with, that it should be published and the public should be able to see it, because it was minuted in the FIFA executive committee that that would happen.
“Sepp Blatter is gone now, but Blatter was happy for that report to be put into the public domain. Legally he was told that while these individuals were being dealt with, they couldn’t publish it. But that’s technically two years ago now.
“Whether FIFA are going to bury it or not I don’t know. I think that’s the most important issue at the moment if I’m being honest with you and I don’t understand why it hasn’t been done.
“FIFA have got to try to establish their name again. Their name was sullied because of the actions of individuals within the organisation, there’s no doubt about that and nobody can hide from that. There’s a whole pile of them, [Jack] Warner, [Julio] Grondona, [Jeffrey] Webb, they were just corrupt and that was where the big problem was.
“I think now, along with the new president [Gianni Infantino] who I think is a good fellow that I know through UEFA, they will work hard to try to restore that image.
“I honestly feel though that the Garcia Report is, in the public eyes, something that FIFA must not just bury.”
Regardless of the corruption uncovered by the Garcia Report, Boyce contends that there was never any realistic prospect of either World Cup being taken away from the host countries based solely on the report’s findings.
The many human rights breaches alleged to have been committed against workers, particularly in Qatar where perhaps thousands have been killed constructing venues for the 2022 World Cup, would potentially provide a more credible basis for either country being stripped of their hosting rights.
Boyce said: “Before I finished at FIFA, the last executive committee that I attended was the one where Domenico Scala, who at that time was the head of the ethics committee and a very good and a very honest fellow, gave a report stating that on the evidence they had received out of the Garcia Report, it would be wrong to take those World Cups away because legally we could end up with massive problems. He had got independent legal advice on this.
“I don’t think they honestly can take the World Cup away from Russia, I think it’s too far down the line to change that now, I really do, although if there was something horrendous then that’s for FIFA to decide on.
“There’s not a lot I can say about the Qatar situation other than that I hope the human rights issues have improved dramatically in Qatar and that it is up to FIFA to ensure that this has happened."
How the World Cup came to be awarded to Russia and Qatar in the first place is something we may never fully know unless, as Boyce hopes, the full findings of the Garcia Report are published in the future.
“It would appear that the due diligence wasn’t [what it should have been]," he said. "There are other major tournaments that have taken place in Qatar though, haven’t there?
“FIFA come in for a lot of flak, but at the end of the day it was actually FIFA who tried to ensure that conditions for workers throughout the whole of that region were improved.
“It’s not only FIFA, but any major sporting organisation, it doesn’t matter if it’s the IOC or World Tennis or whoever the hell it is, I think before they allocate a major final or tournament to a country, they have to make sure that conditions in that country are 100% right before that competition should be awarded.
“The human rights issue was something that was very important and when I was at FIFA. Certainly, the information we had at the time was that the situation was improving dramatically.
“The Garcia report is the one that interests me more than anything else. Why that hasn’t been published, I don’t know.”
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