Former FIFA executive Jack Warner has condemned the leak of an excerpt of FIFA Ethics Committee Report, which brands him as “an accessory to corruption,” as part of an ongoing “malicious agenda” to destroy the cohesion of the Caribbean Football Union (CFU). Yesterday, the Press Association reported that it had seen a FIFA report which says “there is ‘overwhelming evidence’ that Qatar’s Mohammed bin Hammam used bribery in his presidential campaign.” The same report, quoted the Press Association, stated that former FIFA vice-president Jack Warner was “an accessory to corruption.”
The embattled Warner stated: “I, Jack Warner did not partake in the distribution of any cash gifts to my members.” He said, as far as he could establish, “the purported FIFA Ethics Committee report which is being scurrilously circulated is merely a summary of the considerations on which the FIFA Ethics Committee decided on provisional suspensions and its call for a full hearing involving the subjects of the allegations on bid rigging.” He observed that the investigation into these allegations is still ongoing and therefore any suggestion that the report being circulated is the final conclusion of the FIFA Ethics Committee is both misleading and false.
The allegations arose after Bin Hammam entertained members of the CFU on May 10-11 at the Hyatt, Trinidad in his failed FIFA Presidential bid. Both 68-year-old Warner, and Bin Hammam, 62, were provisionally suspended on May 29. Subsequently, Warner resigned his FIFA vice presidential post, president of CFU and president of Concacaf on Monday. The Press Association’s story comes one day after FIFA exonerated Warner after his resignation. Warner said that the Secretariat of the FIFA Ethics Committee have dispatched four copies of the conclusions of the preliminary investigation into FIFA bid-rigging to him—one by fax (which he’s not yet received by press time), one by courier—DHL, one to Lalla, and the last to Concacaf’s office in New York.
“ The copies sent to me and my attorney could not possibly have been accessed by any scurrilous party bent on the malice manifestly intended in the anonymous leaks to the media in an investigation that is still ongoing,” he said. “I can only therefore conclude that this development is part of an ongoing malicious agenda to destroy the cohesion which has made the Caribbean Football Union a factor to be reckoned with in FIFA affairs; and thus diminish CFU’s significance in various areas of FIFA decision making,” he added.
