By Mark Baber
August 17 – A report in the Wall Street Journal suggests an internal investigation by FIFA being conducted by lawyers from the Washington, D.C.-based law firm Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, plans to compel testimony from dozens of current and former top FIFA officials and to seize documents and electronic records.
The WSJ claims that “two people close to the process” have revealed that executives at FIFA “could face expulsion if they refuse to cooperate with US lawyers tapped to perform an internal probe into corruption at soccer’s global governing body,” and; “Top soccer officials also have been told that failure to cooperate could expose them to increased scrutiny from US authorities working on a criminal probe of FIFA members.”
Those who will face questioning in “the most far-reaching and thorough review in FIFA’s 111-year history” reportedly include two of the candidates for FIFA’s presidency: UEFA president Michel Platini and Korean industrialist Chung Mong-Joon.
A FIFA spokesperson confirmed to the WSJ that: “An essential component of our efforts is an internal investigation conducted by external counsel,” saying; “This work is ongoing and therefore we will not comment further.”
According to the WSJ report, the internal investigation, was begun at the direction of the FIFA’s general counsel Marco Villiger who has hired Quinn Emanuel and given William Burck, a former Justice Department attorney and a partner at the firm, the mandate of “doing whatever is necessary to save FIFA as an international federation, though not necessarily the people currently charged with running it.”
According to the report, “Burck’s charge is to conduct an investigation that, while uncovering wrongdoing, will assure FIFA’s commercial partners that future World Cups can take place.”
William Burck chairs Quinn Emanuel ‘s D.C. White Collar and Corporate Investigations Group, and is a trial lawyer who, according to his bio on the law firm’s web site, “focuses on solving clients’ most difficult legal and regulatory challenges, whether in the context of civil, criminal, congressional or parallel probes” and who “represents companies, boards of directors and senior executives in investigations, sensitive matters, corporate crises, litigation and other disputes involving the federal and state governments of the United States (including the Department of Justice, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), District Attorney’s Offices, State Attorneys General, other law enforcement and regulatory agencies, and the United States Congress) and governments of Europe, the Middle East, Asia and Africa.”
With the Department of Justice now apparently keen to look into the hosting of the 2018 and 2022 World Cups, Burck, according to the WSJ, “recently delivered the message that all executive committee members who took part in those bid processes must sit for interviews with his team,” and “the investigation will include accessing all electronic communication, including email and text messages, that exists on FIFA’s computer servers, personal email accounts of current and former executive committee members, and even the computer servers controlled by soccer’s six confederations that oversee the sport around the world.”
A UEFA spokesman has told the WSJ that Platini “has not been contacted by anyone regarding the investigation and will of course cooperate if needed,” but at the time of publication, Burck had not responded to IWF’s request for clarification of his mandate for FIFA and comments on the WSJ article.
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