Blatter sets date for announcement of reforms to clean up FIFA

By Andrew Warshaw

August 28 – Sepp Blatter’s eagerly awaited set of reforms to clean up FIFA after a year of scandal will be announced in October, he has claimed.

Blatter, who won a fourth term of office on June 1 as FIFA President on the back of a promised clean-up of the organisation, has chosen the Executive Committee meeting of October 20-21 to reveal details of exactly how he intends to move forward.

“I will announce a road map of where we go and when we go,” Blatter said, first among which is likely to be rubber-stamping the proposal for future World Cup hosts to be selected by a full Congress hearing rather than simply by FIFA’s 24-strong elite Executive Committee.

Blatter’s former election rival Mohamed Bin Hammam withdrew amid claims he tried to bribe Caribbean voters and is now appealing a lifetime ban imposed by FIFA’s Ethics Committee.

The bribery scandal also ended the football career of senior FIFA vice-president Jack Warner who resigned rather than face a similar punishment.

Two more FIFA Executive members, Amos Adamu and Reynald Temarii, were suspended last November after allegations of vote-trading in the 2018 and 2022 World Cup bid races.

And FIFA is still investigating the roles played by 16 Caribbean officials in allegedly accepting $40,000 cash payments in return for voting for Bin Hammam before he pulled out of the race to face Blatter.

“I’m very disappointed and very sad,” Blatter said of the Caribbean region’s alleged complicity.

“They are part of FIFA and I’m very concerned about that.”

“It was a very difficult year,” Blatter told The Associated Press at a charity event in Switzerland.

“I am working on different items and I will present to the executive committee of FIFA during the meeting,” he said.

After his election Blatter set up a so-called solutions committee involving the good and the great of sport, entertainment and politics including the likes of former United States Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and opera singer Placido Domingo.

But only last week, European Club Association chairman Karl-Heinz Rummenigge called on Blatter to do more, and quickly, or risk the same kind of fate that toppled Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.

Rummenigge told Swiss business magazine Bilanz that Blatter would be smart to introduce reforms “before his successor does it, or before a revolution comes from outside.”

“Mubarak never imagined a year ago that he would be hounded from office,”

Rummenigge, the Bayern Munich chairman, said, threatening a club versus country split unless changes were made sooner rather than later.

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