By Andrew Warshaw
July 23 – The United Nations’ chief sports administrator admits Sepp Blatter has “made some very bad mistakes” during his 17-year tenure but does not believe the outgoing FIFA president is corrupt.
Wilfried Lemke, UN Secretary-General’s Ban Ki-moon’s sports adviser, also says picking a genuinely neutral chairman for the new body charged with implementing robust reform at FIFA will be a tough ask.
Blatter, who steps down on February 26 next year in the wake of the two ongoing corruption investigations into the conduct of FIFA officials and the 2018 and 2022 World Cup bid process, has been trying to portray himself as the victim of the organisation’s worst ever crisis that has snared several of his high-ranking colleagues.
But Lemke told Reuters: “He is not a victim. He has his responsibility, and he made some very bad mistakes, because he didn’t control where money went and what people did. (But) I am totally convinced that he is not corrupt. If you read the papers all around the world and you would ask people around the world, they would say ‘Oh, this is the most corrupt man in the world,’ and this is definitely not correct.
“What I say, he has his responsibility and he has also now finally to resign, if I would be him or if he would have asked me before, I would (have) say, ‘You should have gone some years before’.”
FIFA announced on Monday that it is setting up a Task Force – this one designed to have teeth – to clean up the organisation. Speculation is intensifying that its chairman, who has to be neutral, will be FIFA’s independent audit and compliance committee chief Domenico Scala. Lemke said that whoever it is “must be very free, independent, he must have no financial interest in getting this job, he must be totally, on a financial basis, totally independent.”
Whenever reforms are finally implemented, said Lemke, “there must be a total change in the minds of all the responsible people.”
In terms of the FIFA presidency, he believes it is time a woman was considered. “From my personal point of view, it would be good if he (the new FIFA head) is not from Europe. Why not a woman, this would be a fantastic thing, to have the leader of the biggest sports federation as a woman? This would be very smart.”
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