By Andrew Warshaw
October 22 – Angel Villar Llona, the controversial FIFA vice-president on a new list of prominent officials facing possible sanction for corruption or wrongdoing, tried to block this week’s ground-breaking move that gave ethics investigators freedom to publish the names of those being probed.
Earlier this week, FIFA’s executive committee lifted strict rules on confidentiality by giving the green light to its ethics committee to disclose information about individual cases before having to wait months, or sometimes even years, for final verdicts to be reached.
No sooner had the landmark decision been taken than Villar, long rumoured to have failed to co-operate with the notorious Michael Garcia report into the 2018 and 2022 World Cup bid process, was cited by the ethics committee as being one of those who had been investigated. The Spaniard, who led the joint Spain-Portugal bid for 2018, is now awaiting sentence.
Insideworldfootball has learned that Villar was the only member of the executive committee who voted against giving ethics investigators greater transparency which suggests he had something to hide.
“The vote was 19-1,” one exco member confirmed, explaining that six of the 26-strong body were missing from the meeting, either because of suspension as in the cases of Sepp Blatter and Michel Platini, or because they couldn’t make the emergency session because of prior commitments.
It is understood Issa Hayatou, the African football chief who chaired the meeting in the absence of Blatter, asked who was in favour and who against. “One hand went up against and it was Villar’s,” Insideworldfootball has been told.
Originally the item was not on the agenda having been previously been referred to FIFA’s legal committee – headed by none other than Villar, a staunch supporter of Blatter. But given the recent escalation of FIFA’s corruption crisis, the item was brought back for an immediate decision on the request of several exco members rather than risk Villar sitting on it. “He gave a speech about how it was the wrong thing to do but he was completely outvoted,” said one high-ranking FIFA official who attended Tuesday’s session.
Although Villar has never previously been officially named as being among those investigated, he is known to have been strongly resistant to the Garcia investigation and reportedly refused an initial request to be interviewed by the American attorney.
Such a refusal would have been a violation of the FIFA Code of Ethics and last November ethics judge Hans-Joachim Eckert, in his summary of Garcia’s report, revealed one federation involved in the World Cup bid process was deemed to have been “particularly uncooperative”.
“With regard to one specific bid team, the report noted that the relevant federation was particularly un-cooperative in responding to the investigatory chamber’s requests,” Eckert wrote.
At the time of the controversial ballot in December 2010 it was rumoured that Portugal/Spain had agreed a vote-swap deal with Qatar which in the end didn’t help Villar whose bid lost out to Russia but may well have assisted Qatar which of course won the 2022 ballot. Blatter himself has even suggested an informal deal had been made.
Villar’s refusal to support to greater transparency in the wake of the worst corruption scandal in sporting history calls into question the decision to allow him to take over several roles and responsibilities previously handled by Platini.
With supreme irony, he replaced the Frenchman on Tuesday as interim chairman of the 2018 World Cup organising committee, which could be regarded as a conflict of interest given his own predicament. Public naming of Villar also heaps embarrassment on UEFA where he is the highest ranking elected official after Platini and chaired last week’s emergency summit to discuss how to proceed following Platini’s suspension.
UEFA now have to decide whether to officially install the Spanish FA boss as its interim president, as FIFA have done with Hayatou, or find someone else.
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