By Andrew Warshaw
November 16 – The crackdown on corruption by FIFA’s ethics investigators has snared another major figure with Nepal’s Ganesh Thapa banned for 10 years for bribery.
Thapa, head of his country’s federation, was an Asian Football Confederation vice-president at the time the body was led by Mohamed bin Hammam and his misconduct related to elections for Asian seats on the FIFA executive committee in 2009 and 2011.
In May 2009, Bin Hammam, since banned for life, won a bitterly contested election to retain his FIFA executive committee seat against Shaikh Salman Bin Ibrahim Al Khalifa of Bahrain, who went on to lead the AFC and is now a FIFA presidential candidate for next February’s election.
Thapa, who has also been under investigation by Nepalese authorities accused of embezzling funds that were supposed to be used for football development, was found by FIFA’s ethics committee to have “committed various acts of misconduct over several years, including the solicitation and acceptance of cash payments from another football official, for both personal and family gain … in the context of the 2009 and 2011 elections for the FIFA Executive Committee at the Asian Football Confederation (AFC) congress.”
FIFA’s ethics committee has also handed out a two-year ban to Viphet Sihachakr, president of the Laos Football Federation. It said Sihachakr “solicited and accepted a payment from another football official” in relation to the 2011 election.
FIFA’s ethics committee did not name the official concerned in either case but speculation seems bound to fall on bin Hammam or the man responsible in the south Asian region for managing development funds at the time, Sri Lanka’s Manilal Fernando, a former FIFA executive committee member and AFC vice-president who was also banned for life, in 2013.
Thapa, who will immediately lose his place on FIFA’s Under-20 World Cup organizing committee, told the BBC he would fight the ban since he said he had been co-operating. “I had been extending co-operation to their investigation for the last four years. I will now appeal it at the Court of Arbitration for Sport,” said Thapa, who is also a minister of the Nepal parliament.
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