By Andrew Warshaw
September 22 – UEFA president Michel Platini has denounced FIFA’s ethics committee over the way it has handled the growing controversy regarding 65 designer watches donated to many of the world’s leading football administrators at the World Cup.
Last week, the ethics committee ruled that those officials in possession of the watches, which have a combined value of more than $1.5 million, must return them by October 24 or face possible sanctions.
Platini admitted that he was one of those offered a watch and accepts that the culture of gift-giving runs deep among FIFA powerbrokers. But he has questioned why the governing body was only now making an issue out of the watches, acting on newspaper reports in England and Germany, instead of at the time they were distributed..
“If the ethics committee was not pleased, they should’ve told us that four months ago in Brazil, when we received the watches,” Platini told reporters on the fringes of last week’s Euro 2020 host cities announcement.
“They were aware that we were receiving these watches because everybody received them. Because there’s an article in the press, all of a sudden FIFA says that they need to return the watches. There’s something that’s very surprising to me in the way that this process has played out and I do not like that.”
Platini says he considers it impolite to return gifts so he would prefer to make a donation to charity for the value of the watch but added that if he was asked to return it by FIFA he would do so. “I’m a well educated person. I don’t return gifts.”
The watches were left in hotel rooms by the Brazilian football federation’s (CBF) sponsors to all of FIFA’s executive committee, representatives of the 32 finalists in Brazil and five other members of South American associations.
” Every now and again, you do receive watches,” said Platini. “But these are advertising watches and so forth. We all receive watches. I’ve received several. But I was surprised to see the value of the watch.”
FIFA revised its ethics code in 2011 to outlaw gifts above a certain value and it will be interesting to discover who returns the latest gifts. The CBF said it had paid $8,750 for each watch but FIFA’s ethics committee obtained an independent valuation of SFr 25,000 ($26,600).
English FA chairman Greg Dyke, who says he put his gift of a watch in a bag earmarked for charity, also said he was unaware of the value and would have liked FIFA to have stepped in and taken action in Brazil.
“FIFA should have looked and said: ‘These are £16,000 watches – you can’t give them out.’ I think the whole culture of gift giving needs to be looked at again,” said Dyke. “Personally, I would get rid of it.”
Dyke admitted he had also received another watch when England visited Switzerland in the European Championship at the start of the month. “Everywhere you go, every time you have a game they give you some sort of present.”
Dyke’s comments, made to BBC radio, came on the same day the Sunday Times newspaper questioned his own ethical behaviour in accepting the watch, knowingly or otherwise.
“At the very least Greg Dyke was guilty of negligence,” wrote the paper’s Chief Sports Writer David Walsh. Inferring hypocrisy by Dyke, he added: “FIFA needs to be questioned from within and without. But those who criticise football’s governing body need to abide by the standards they demand of those they accuse.”
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