By Andrew Warshaw in Doha
February 20 – Former Asian football chief Mohamed Bin Hammam’s eagerly-awaited appeal against his lifetime ban for alleged bribery will be heard on April 18 and 19 at the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) in Lausanne.
Bin Hammam (pictured) was kicked out of football last July after FIFA’s Ethics Committee found him guilty of attempting to bribe Caribbean officials during his election challenge against FIFA President Sepp Blatter.
Bin Hammam has long suspected a conspiracy and denies any wrongdoing.
He is determined to regain his standing and has been preparing what he hopes will be a compelling case to overturn his ban.
The hearing at CAS, sport’s highest court of law, is the second launched by Bin Hammam, who was one of the game’s most powerful administrators before being thrown out following the infamous cash-for-votes meeting in Trinidad last May.
He has already lost one previous CAS appeal at which his legal team failed to stop the Asian Football Confederation from replacing him as its President.
He is seeking both CAS verdicts before the AFC is legally obliged to hold a Presidential election on May 29.
China’s Zhang Jilong has been running the Asian body in the interim and has taken Bin Hammam’s seat on FIFA’s Executive Committee.
It is not known whether Bin Hammam, who withdrew his challenge to Blatter immediately after the scandal emerged, will appear in person at the April hearing which was lodged back in November.
A statement from Bin Hammam’s legal team at the time said the FIFA Ethics Committee was always going to find against him “whatever the validity of the case presented to them.”
It added that the Committee had based its decision on circumstantial evidence “founded on lies”.
But in addition to Bin Hammam’s ban, a raft of Caribbean officials were sanctioned following claims they were offered $40,000 (£25,272/€30,518) cash gifts to vote for the Qatari against Blatter.
Additionally, former FIFA senior vice-president Jack Warner, then head both of CONCACAF and the Caribbean Football Union – the man alleged to have orchestrated the cash-for-votes meeting – resigned instead of facing an investigation into his own role in the affair.
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