Fifa publishes Garcia report in new twist to infamous 2010 vote

Fifa has taken the dramatic step of publishing a controversial internal report into the 2018 and 2022 World Cup bidding process after it was leaked to a German newspaper this week.

Produced by Fifa’s chief ethics investigator Michael Garcia, pictured, in 2014, the report’s contents had been kept secret until Bild obtained a copy and started publishing yesterday.

The first set of revelations from the so-called Garcia report were not particularly new but still painted a bleak picture of the background to theinfamous2010votewhich gave the 2018 World Cup to Russia and the 2022 World Cup to Qatar. More damning revelations about the Qatari bid, however, were expected from Bild today, only for Fifa to spike its guns by publishing the whole report on its website.

In a statement, Fifa said the new bosses of its independent ethics committee, chief investigator Maria Claudia Rojas and lead judge Vassilios Skouris, had taken the decision. It said Fifa president Gianni Infantino and the current members of the Fifa Council had been calling for this move for over a year but had been blocked by the predecessors of Rojas and Skouris, Cornel Borbely and Hans-joachim Eckert, who were unceremoniously replaced last month.

The successful bids by Russia and Qatar in 2010 have been mired in controversy, particularly as the freespending Gulf state beat powerful rivals such as the United States to the 2022 prize.

After repeated claims about corruption in the runup to those votes, Fifa asked its then-chief ethics investigator Garcia to compile a report into the bidding nations for both World Cups.

Until Bild started to release extracts from his report on Monday, the world had only ever seen Eckert’s assessment of Garcia’s work.

Among the first stories revealed by Bild were claims that the Qataris flew three members of Fifa’s executive committee to a party in Rio on a private jet shortly before the vote, that the Qatari bid used access to its state-ofthe-art Aspire sports academy to influence voters and that £1.6million was sent to a bank account belonging to the 10-year-old daughter of another Exco voter.

That last allegation was first made by the Daily Telegraph in 2014 and there is a sense that many of the most lurid claims have been reported by one media outlet or another over the last few years. Bild journalist Peter Rossberg himself wrote on Facebook there are “no surprises” for anybody who has followed this story closely. In fact, he went on to write that “the report does not provide proof that World Cup 2018 or 2022 has been bought”.

But yesterday Bild described the Garcia report as another piece in the puzzle and suggested that only when all those pieces are put together will the complete picture be obvious.