By Andrew Warshaw
April 28 – World football’s corruption scandal has snared yet another high-profile culprit after Guam’s Richard Lai, a standing member of FIFA’s audit and compliance committee, pleaded guilty in the United States in the latest twist to the ongoing probe.
Lai, head of the Guam FA and a senior Asian Football Confederation official, admitted accepting nearly $1 million in bribes, US prosecutors announced, the first time the investigation into sustained malpractise has directly spread to Asia, though Guam is a US territory with Donald Trump as its president.
In addition to being a member of the very FIFA body that is supposed to be all about good governance and weeding out the miscreants, Lai is the AFC’s marketing chief and a member of its executive committee.
Given his various roles, Lai’s case – he admitted two counts of wire fraud and one count of failing to disclose a foreign bank account – will raise eyebrows across Asian football as well as heap further embarrassment on FIFA whose president Gianni Infantino who has been at pains to put the organisation’s tainted past behind him.
In a Brooklyn court on Thursday, Lai admitted taking bribes amounting to $100,000 in 2011 from a candidate for the FIFA presidency. The money apparently came from an account in Qatar and was deposited in Lai’s bank in the Philippines. Although disgraced former AFC boss Mohamed bin Hammam was not mentioned by name, it is clear the “candidate” can only have been him since he was seeking to oust Sepp Blatter as FIFA president in that very time.
Lai, an American passport holder, also admitted to receiving more than $850,000 in bribes between 2009 and 2014 from a group of unnamed officials in the AFC region, using his position to help to influence their standing. According to some unconfirmed reports, the main provider was an unnamed member of the Kuwait Football Association.
“Today’s plea marks another important step in our ongoing effort to root out corruption in international soccer,” said Bridget Rohde, acting US attorney for the eastern district of New York.
Trials are set to begin on November for five of the 40-odd individuals and entitites currently being held in the United States. The five have all pleaded not guilty though the majority of those brought to court have negotiated plea bargains.
No sooner had Lai’s crimes been uncovered than the AFC’s Disciplinary and Ethics Committee provisionally suspended him “with immediate effect” saying it would make no further comment for the moment.
Whether FIFA’s ethics committee knew about Lai’s transgressions or US prosecutors acted alone, within hours of the court hearing he found himself provisionally suspended from all football activity for 90 days, with the possibility of a further 45-day ban. The decision was taken on the request of FIFA’s chief prosecutor Cornel Borbély based on Lai’s guilty plea which appeared to have taken many of his colleagues by surprise.
The last time a new defendant had been charged in the US-led investigation was in March 2016, when Colombian Miguel Trujillo pleaded guilty to four counts of wire fraud conspiracy, money laundering conspiracy, and tax fraud. What the latest case shows is that the anti-corruption probe, previously spearheaded by former US attorney general Loretta Lynch, has not been buried under the Donald Trump regime as many had believed.
Lai has served uninterrupted as president of the Guam FA since 2001. Six years later he was elected to the AFC’s executive committee and in 2013 was voted to the FIFA Audit and Compliance Committee. Local reports in Guam, a tiny palm-fringed Pacific island and the AFC’s smallest member, quoted Cheri Stewart, executive director of the Guam FA, as saying a statement would be released on Monday or Tuesday.
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