By Andrew Warshaw
January 23 – Any hopes Gianni Infantino may have that FIFA has buried its toxic past have again been laid bare with yet another former prominent official banned for life by FIFA’s own ethics committee.
This time the culprit is Najeeb Chirakal, a key aide of disgraced former Asian Football Confederation president Mohammed bin Hammam.
The life ban, recommendation by ethics investigator Vanessa Allard, has been endorsed by FIFA’s main ethics judge Hans-Joachim Eckert, who found Chirakal guilty of breaching eight different articles of the FIFA code of ethics including bribery and corruption, offering gifts, conflicts of interest and failing to cooperate with investigators.
Eckert’s department ruled that he was involved in “several unethical payments made on behalf of a third party to various football officials between 2009 and 2011.”
That was the time Bin Hammam was Asian Football Confederation president and a senior powerbroker whose ambitions to become FIFA president were crushed when he, too, was banned for life – first over cash payments to Caribbean voters in his failed challenge against Sepp Blatter; then, when that ban was overturned by the Court of Arbitration for Sport, for financial mismanagement at the AFC.
Chirakal, who was based in bin Hammam’s native Qatar, had previously been identified as allegedly the middle man for African and Asian officials seeking cash payments from Bin Hammam. In October 2012, he was provisionally suspended for two months for failing to co-operate with an investigation into Bin Hammam when he declined to provide requested “documents and information”.
He was later back in business saying he was working on behalf of the Qatari sports officials but has now been thrown out for good.
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