By Andrew Warshaw
September 18 – Last week’s remarkable testimony to a group of British parliamentarians by former FIFA governance guru Miguel Maduro not only exposed the way FIFA, under Gianni Infantino, tried to exert influence on independent judicial bodies but also highlighted serious misgivings about FIFA’s electoral process.
Although much of Maduro’s evidence focussed on claims that FIFA tried to block Russian World Cup supremo Vitaly Mutko from being barred from keeping his seat on the organisation’s ruling council, it also raised alarming questions about the extent to which FIFA may have turned a blind eye to the way Hany Abo Rida (pictured), an ally of Infantino-backed African football leader Ahmad Ahmad, won his own place on the all-powerful council.
A few days before the FIFA Congress in Bahrain in May, the Egyptian FA, which Abo Rida chairs, hosted a party – described as a ‘celebration ceremony’ to welcome recently-elected Confederation of African Football (CAF) President Ahmad – in Cairo.
The event, according to some reports, was organised by the Egyptian FA’s main sponsor, who afterwards flew delegates on to Bahrain on a private jet. It was there, at CAF’s regional congress shortly before FIFA’s, that Rida won a landslide victory over Zelkifili Ngoufonja by 54 votes to 4.
In his testimony last week, Maduro declared that the events leading up to Rida’s victory, if true, would have been “a violation of the principles under which elections should take place.”
Maduro revealed that the CAF had been mandated by his governance committee to allow Ngoufonja to speak but that this had been rejected by the CAF leadership. “Normally, confederations don’t allow different candidates to speak at a congress, which can be understandable if there are many positions and many candidates,” Maduro told British MPs.
“But this candidate’s (Ngoufonja) admissibility had initially been excluded without even being communicated to our governance committee.”
“Our committee recommended – and said this to (FIFA) Secretary General (Fatma Samoura) who then communicated this to CAF – that he be given the opportunity to speak, which did not happen. We made that recommendation but that recommendation was not followed. So we intended to investigate the matter.”
However, after Maduro was sacked by FIFA, he was unable to pursue any such investigation.
See: http://www.insideworldfootball.com/2017/05/07/abu-rida-calls-african-presidents-cairo-celebration-lobbying-private-jet-ride/
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