By Andrew Warshaw
May 14 – Four and half years after the vote to hand the 2022 World Cup to Qatar, one of FIFA’s former vice-presidents has been banned for a second time for his conduct in the build-up to the contest – this time for eight years.
Former Oceania confederation chief Reynald Temarii has been kicked out for taking €305,640 from disgraced Qatari powerbroker Mohamed bin Hammam to pay for his legal costs in a case linked to the controversial ballot.
Temarii has already served a one-year FIFA ban after being caught up in a newspaper sting over allegations he tried to sell his World Cup vote. He had been secretly filmed by reporters posing as lobbyists for a US consortium and was punished for breaching rules on loyalty and confidentiality by requesting payment to finance a sports academy.
As a result of that ban, Temarii was barred from voting in the 2018 and 2022 World Cup bid contest. But in a tactical move, the Tahitian appealed in order to try and buy time so that he could take part in the vote after all.
Oceania had been mandated to support Australia, one of Qatar’s four rivals in the 2022 contest, and bin Hammam had offered to cover Temarii’s legal expenses in the hope, it is widely assumed, that he would switch his vote to Qatar the second round.
Ultimately, however, Temarii never got the chance to take part and his “arrangement” with bin Hammam collapsed.
In its statement banning Temarii, who had made a comeback as general director of the Tahiti Football Association, FIFA said he had met with Bin Hammam, then president of the Asian Football Confederation, in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in November 2010 before pursuing his appeal.
It said Temarii breached five sections of FIFA’s ethics code relating to accepting gifts, conflicts of interest, loyalty, confidentiality and general rules of conduct when he accepted the money from Bin Hammam in January 2011.
Bin Hammam, who campaigned for Blatter in his first two election wins in 1998 and 2002, turned against his former ally by announcing he was running against him in 2011, the year after Qatar was awarded the World Cup.
But he was forced to withdraw days before the presidential election when implicated in bribing Caribbean FIFA members. Although Bin Hammam overturned a lifetime ban imposed by FIFA for that, he was later expelled again for financial mismanagement of Asian Football Confederation finances.
A statement from the FIFA ethics committee said its latest verdict was handed down after a hearing attended by both Temarii and Cornel Borbely who was promoted to head the committee’s investigatory chamber after the resignation last autumn of Michael Garcia.
Temarii can appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport but of more significance is the timing of his latest ban, coming as it does just over two weeks before the FIFA presidential election when Blatter is hot favourite to be re-elected.
Insiders are suggesting it is no co-incidence and that FIFA is deliberately putting a marker down at this point in time in order to show it is getting ever tougher on corruption, a worrying situation perhaps for a number of other high-ranking individuals who may now be looking over their shoulders as the fallout from the bin Hammam era rears its head again.
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