By Andrew Warshaw
September 18 – Just as FIFA hosts a landmark summit on ethics in sport, fresh details have emerged that a raft of high-ranking officials were offered expensive watches at the World Cup.
The revelations – first revealed in newspapers in England and Germany – have been confirmed by FIFA’s ethics committee which disclosed the officials included all executive committee members, representatives of the 32 nations who competed in the tournament as well as other associations from South America.
It has ordered those who accepted the watches, worth SFr25,000 each, to return them by October 24 to avoid being sanctioned for breaking FIFA’s strict ethics code. The returned watches will then be donated to a non-profit organization or “organisations committed to corporate social responsibility projects in Brazil.”
According to some reports, three exco members – Moya Dodd of Australia, Asia’s FIFA vice-president Prince Ali bin al-Hussein of Jordan and United States soccer boss Sunil Gulati – were responsible for alerting FIFA to the gifts, distributed in hotel rooms by the Brazilian federation (CBF), and handed them back.
The FIFA ethics committee made no mention of this but confirmed in a statement the CBF distributed 65 gift bags containing the watches – and criticised the World Cup’s host association for doing so.
“(The) CBF should not have offered the watches, and those who received gift bags should have promptly checked whether the items inside were appropriate and, upon discovering the watch, either returned it or…reported the matter to the investigatory chamber,” said the ethics committee statement which came 24 hours before FIFA was due to host the inaugural World Summit on Ethics in Sport attended by its president Sepp Blatter and the heads of both chambers of the ethics committee, Michael Garcia and Hans-Joachim Eckert. All three are due to address delegates.
“In an effort to resolve this matter expeditiously, the investigatory chamber (of the ethics committee) will not pursue further formal ethics proceedings in this matter against officials who submit the Parmigiani watch they received from CBF…by no later than October 24, 2014.”
The revelations come at an embarrassing time for Fifa FIFA which has made stringent efforts to clean itself up following a raft of scandals that prompted a widespread reform process designed to cut out instances of corruption or ethics breaching.
– ”The FIFA code of ethics plainly prohibits such gifts. Football officials may not offer or accept gifts that have more than ‘symbolic or trivial value’,” the ethics committee statement said.
– “If in doubt, gifts shall not be offered or accepted. Football officials are expected to be aware of the importance of their duties and concomitant obligations and responsibilities.”
Confirming the value of the watches, the ethics committee added: “CBF produced records indicating that it obtained the watches from Parmigiani, a CBF sponsor, at a price of $8,750 each. The investigatory chamber commissioned an independent appraisal of one of the watches CBF distributed.”
“That appraisal determined that the watch had a market value of CHF 25,000. That value was confirmed by a later appraisal done in Zurich.”
In 2011 David Owen interviewed Hublot boss Jean-Claude Biver about his football sponsorship strategy. Read the inverview at http://www.insideworldfootball.com/david-owen/8885-of-juve-manchester-united-and-maradona-or-why-a-luxury-watchmaker-sponsors-football-?highlight=WyJiaXZlciJd
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