Mark Field
Main Page: Mark Field (Conservative - Cities of London and Westminster)(8 years, 11 months ago)
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Damian Collins
My hon. Friend is right. We are talking about a widespread, systemic failure of an organisation—widespread corruption—and the role of Jack Warner in this is key. He has said that he has handed to the FBI an “avalanche” of evidence, which includes references to Sepp Blatter himself. I think it is highly likely that Sepp Blatter will be asked to co-operate with both the FBI investigation and the Swiss authorities’ criminal investigation into the World cup bidding process.
Mark Field (Cities of London and Westminster) (Con)
My hon. Friend’s concerns about the systemic corruption within FIFA have been known for some time, but does he share my concerns about why the Football Association decided in 2010 to bid for the World cup in 2018? If FIFA is rotten to the core, why was British football having anything to do with this matter?
Damian Collins
I agree with my right hon. Friend. It has been known for a long time that there are systemic problems within the organisation of FIFA. The England World cup bid, although it was commendable and carried out with a degree of vigour by all who took part, was always doomed to failure, largely for the reasons set out to the Select Committee by Lord Triesman: for their necessary support, members of the FIFA executive committee wanted to be rewarded in whatever way they saw fit. The allegation that Lord Triesman made about Jack Warner was that he solicited bribes so that he could personally profit from his role within football, which is also the case with most of the other allegations: people sought to profit personally from their positions in world football. The FBI has gone through that in some detail in its report.
Mark Field
I understand what my hon. Friend says: the bid was doomed to failure, which we can see even without 20/20 hindsight. The broader issue is why on earth the FA had anything to do with this organisation. It was well understood that FIFA was a corrupt organisation, and in a sense our own footballing organisation, which is not without its own problems, as we are well aware, is now complicit after trying to secure the 2018 World cup. Indeed, any talk now of a World cup being awarded to us at some point in the near future without cleaning the stables seems to be entirely wide of the mark.
Damian Collins
We have seen allegations of corruption going back for almost the entirety of Sepp Blatter’s presidency of FIFA, and before that, too. The process that concluded in 2010 for the rights to host the tournaments in 2018 and 2022 was on a previously unseen level. The Football Association may have been aware of some of the murky waters it was getting into in bidding for the World cup but nevertheless thought that it could make a good, strong case. The fact that England had the strongest technical bid but received only two votes is testimony to the fact that footballing grounds were not the key defining factor for the members of the executive committee who voted. It should also be noted that seven of the 22 people who voted on where the World cup should be played have already had to resign from their positions in world football due to corruption, and others are still under investigation.