By Martin Volkmar
July 6 – Ex-German President Christian Wulff, speaking to SPORT1 in Germany, has rebutted the allegations of FIFA president Sepp Blatter that he had significantly influenced the controversial 2022 World Cup award to Qatar.
“I have already rejected this absurdity in my book in 2014,” Wulff said.
Blatter had said in an interview with the Welt am Sonntag that the award for 2022 World Cup hosting to Qatar was due to political interference by the then German president Wulff and France’s former president Nicolas Sarkozy.
“…There were two political interventions Messrs Sarkozy and Wulff who tried to influence their electors (nationals on the executive committee) which is why we now have a World Cup in Qatar,” Blatter said, “The German Football Association also received such a recommendation from Wulff because of Germany’s economic interests in Qatar.”
Wulff said these suspicions been published in his book last year, rejecting the accusations which he attributed to his troubled relationship with media company Springer-Verlag. “After the break with Springer, the world spread on Sunday in May 2014, untruthfully, that I might have acted on the FIFA President and Franz Beckenbauer in favor of a world championship award to Qatar, although I talked to neither of them about it nor contacted them,” he said.
The former DFB president Theo Zwanziger, however, told a different story in Sport Bild two years ago. “The president back then asked me about the upcoming World Cup award and asked in this regard what the opportunities for Qatar were,” Zwanziger was quoted as saying. “At the time I saw no chance for Qatar and conveyed this to the President.”
Germany’s Franz Beckenbauer, a FIFA vice-president at the time and one of the 24 on FIFA’s executive committee, says he had not been informed of any call. Beckenbauer refuses to say who he voted for in the election.
However, France’s FIFA Executive Committee member Michel Platini, made it clear some time ago that he had a dinner with Sarkozy and Qatar’s Emir Sheikh Hamad Al Thani, and that he had voted for Qatar – but he maintains the dinner did not influence his decision. Platini’s son, soon after the vote, began working with a Qatari sports appareil company.
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