By Andrew Warshaw
November 13 – After years of evading punishment and blocking reform while others around him were hit hard, Spain’s Fifa vice-president Angel Villar Llona was finally sanctioned today for failing to co-operate with the official investigation into the 2018 and 2022 World Cup bid process.
However, the penalty of a warning and a 25,000 Swiss franc fine handed down by Fifa ethics judge Hans-Joachim Eckert will be viewed by many as nothing more than token wrap on the knuckles for the Spanish football chief who consistently refused to co-operate with the probe carried out by Fifa’s former ethics investigator Michael Garcia yet who has somehow escaped a ban.
Villar, as Uefa’s most senior official behind Michel Platini, has been running the confederation as a temporary stand-in while Platini fights his Fifa suspension.
That will surely now come under scrutiny and examination following a statement by Eckert’s adjudicatory chamber which said the Spaniard “failed to behave in accordance with the general rules of conduct applicable to football officials in the context of the investigations conducted by the then chairman of the investigatory chamber of the FIFA Ethics Committee regarding the 2018/2022 FIFA World Cup bids.”
Justifying why he received such a light sentence, Eckert’s office said Villar had “subsequently expressed his commitment to collaborate and demonstrated a willingness to cooperate”.
It is important to stress that the sanctions available to Eckert over the specific issue of non-co-operation were limited since ethics investigators did not consider the findings against Villar worthy of a strong punishment based on the evidence they had in front of them. However, there is already considerable speculation that a separate, more serious investigation into Villar’s overall conduct might be under way, most likely leading to a far sterner penalty down the road.
Eckert’s office, meanwhile, has banned Jean Guy Blaise Mayolas, Vice-President of the Congolese Football Association (FECOFOOT), and Badji Mombo Wantete, the federation’s General Secretary, for six months. Both were found guilty of committing acts “contrary to article 13 (General rules of conduct) and article 20 (Offering and accepting gifts and other benefits)” of the Fifa ethics code. “Taking into consideration that they have already been suspended provisionally for 135 days, the remaining ban to be served will be 45 days as from the notification of this decision,” the statement made clear.
Last month, InsideWorldFootball exclusively revealed that Villar, who had been named on a new list of prominent officials facing possible sanction for corruption or wrongdoing, tried to block a ground-breaking move that gave ethics investigators greater freedom to publish the names of those being probed.
When 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, Villar, who led the joint Spain-Portugal bid for 2018, was the only member of the exco who voted against giving ethics investigators greater transparency which suggested he had something to hide.
Although he had never previously been officially named as being among those investigated, the ultra-conservative Spanish lawyer is known to have been at the forefront of a group of exco members who tried to block Garcia’s 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 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. Sepp 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 called into question the decision to allow him to take over several roles and responsibilities previously handled by Platini.