Qatar’s World Cup bid ‘attacked rivals’

THE Qatar 2022 World Cup bid team broke Fifa rules by running a secret campaign to sabotage their rivals for the tournament, The Sunday Times has claimed.

The newspaper says it has been passed documents by a whistleblower who worked with the Qatar bid.

It says the bid team used a PR agency and former CIA operatives to disseminate fake propaganda about its main competitors, the United States and Australia.

This allegedly involved recruiting prominent figures to criticise the bids in their own countries, thus giving the impression they lacked support at home.

Fifa rules say that bidders must “refrain from making any written or oral statements of any kind, whether adverse or otherwise, about the bids or candidatures of any other member association which has expressed an interest in hosting and staging the competitions”.

MP Damian Collins, chairman of the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport select committee, said Qatar should face sanctions, if they are shown to have broken rules imposed by Fifa.

Qatar’s Supreme Committee for Delivery and Legacy said it “rejected” all the claims made by the paper.

Fifa said an investigation into the circumstances of the bid had already been carried out and no wrongdoing was found. AT LEAST 14 people have been killed and another 160 injured after a magnitude-6.4 earthquake struck Indonesia’s Lombok Island, a popular tourist destination next to Bali, officials said yesterday.