Mutko can run but he cannot hide from critics
Russian FA. He shared a stage with FIFA president Gianni Infantino in Moscow on Friday for a press conference supposed to be about the 2018 World Cup that became instead an hourlong debacle about drugs.
Infantino insists any Olympic ban for Russia will have no effect on the World Cup but it will highlight FIFA’s own inaction to date on allegations about Mutko and doping in Russian football.
At least 34 Russian footballers, named to FIFA, have been implicated in the statesupported doping plot.
And Mutko was being investigated by FIFA’s ethics chamber earlier this year for his alleged involvement in doping. The status of that investigation has been unclear since May, when Infantino in effect sacked the key individuals leading it.
FIFA’s press office say they cannot comment on the Mutko probe because they don’t know anything about the ethics chamber’s work, such is the independent nature of it within FIFA.
The ethics chamber say they don’t comment on investigations. But Sportsmail has documentary evidence of an investigation and can reveal that there were such serious concerns that it might be compromised earlier this year that FIFA was planning to set up secure servers to receive documentary evidence, implicating Mutko personally, from potential witnesses.
The implication from one senior FIFA insider was that the ethics chamber’s work on Mutko could be susceptible to hackers.
Mutko said on Friday: ‘There has never been and will never be any state programmes related to doping in this country.’