In this historic tumbling out of corruption denied for decades, the sudden naming, shaming and naked comeuppance for formerly unimpeachable football barons, there was at times a kind of poetic neatness. On the very same day that the thumping report was delivered into the frauds and alleged vote-buying which had constructed the $26m monument to himself in Trinidad, Dr João Havelange resigned. He had been the honorary president of Fifa, having been elevated to that sainted status after the election of his anointed successor, Blatter, in 1998. Yet fifteen years into this honorarium, on 18 April 2013, aged ninety-seven, the fearsome old ruler stepped down from the pedestal.
It was the same day as, but unrelated to, the revelations in Trinidad. Havelange’s resignation came days before the public verdict in a completely different scandal, which definitively revealed endemic corruption by Havelange himself. It was even more far-reaching than the frauds exposed in the Americas, because this had been rooted in the heart of Fifa in Zurich. The revelations would finally taint Havelange’s own record, and his and Blatter’s entire forty-year era in control.
After years of resistance by Fifa under Blatter’s presidency, a court document was finally to be published, which was reputation-shredding. It disclosed that Havelange had indeed taken bribes from the marketing company ISL throughout the 1990s, in return for him selling to ISL Fifa’s TV and marketing rights for World Cups. The document had finally been exposed to daylight in July 2012 after applications, including by the BBC, that it should no longer be kept secret, as Fifa had adamantly argued it should. It was an order made by the prosecutor’s office in the central Swiss canton of Zug, south of Zurich, when it stopped criminal proceedings against Fifa itself, as well as against Havelange and Ricardo Teixeira personally, in May 2010.
There has been some misunderstanding over the years of what this court order signified. It was not the settlement, repayment by Havelange and Teixeira to the liquidator of ISL, of the bribes they took. In fact it showed that the Zug prosecutor had been considering a criminal prosecution of those men–and of Fifa itself–for ‘disloyal management’. The document detailed the closing of that action by agreement, after Fifa paid significant money to the court. The prosecution was being considered because Fifa, with Blatter as president, had not sought repayment of these bribes trousered by Havelange and Teixeira from ISL, despite learning these millions were paid when they sold Fifa’s TV and marketing rights. Instead, Fifa had actually been involved in Teixeira settling any further liability to the ISL liquidator by paying just 2.5m CHF, and Fifa itself secured from the liquidator an agreement not to take any further action. Apparently robbed of fortunes over years by president Havelange, and Teixeira, a trustee on the executive committee, Blatter’s Fifa had actually worked hard, in February 2004, to make the affair go away, settle it and avoid any publicity of the bribery.
The court order also highlighted that Blatter himself knew about one of the payments from ISL: 1.5m CHF for Havelange in 1997. It had been mistakenly sent to a Fifa account and was brought to Blatter’s attention when he was still the secretary general. Without making any further inquiries, he had it sent back to ISL. The document states that this, among other things, proved that ‘Fifa had knowledge of the bribery payments to persons within its organs’. Blatter, though, has always said he did not know it was a bribe.
The document published in 2012 which exposed all this revealed that the Zug prosecutor did believe that Havelange and Teixeira were guilty of criminal conduct in taking the bribes, and that Fifa was criminally guilty of sanctioning it by settling with the liquidator. But due to various factors, including the length of time which had passed, Havelange’s age and the assumption that Fifa would reform, the prosecutor himself agreed to discontinue the action and did not proceed with criminal charges. Fifa had to pay 2.5m CHF to settle the proposed prosecution, as did Teixeira; Havelange, now ninety-four and pleading relative poverty, had to pay 500,000 CHF.
There are multiple layers of shame in what was exposed. The first and most basic is that Dr João Havelange–lauded, praised, sanctified by Fifa since his supplanting of Sir Stanley Rous in 1974–was indeed corrupt. The document confirmed that it was really true: at the moment in the 1990s when the TV market ballooned in value, Havelange had sold the rights for the 2002 and 2006 World Cups to this company, originally founded by the Adidas owner Horst Dassler, with long tentacles wormed into Fifa and football. Havelange and Teixeira, his former son-in-law who had taken over as president of the Brazil FA, the CBF, and was a member of the Fifa executive committee from 1994, were paid bribes in return, of 41m CHF. The payments, itemised in a list with many round figures, were made to them by ISL throughout the nineties, from 1992 to 2000.
‘João Havelange pocketed these commissions that he received due to his position in Fifa,’ the court order says, ‘and he refrained from disclosing or giving them to Fifa. The payments were aimed at using the influence of João Havelange as president of Fifa with respect to the contracts ultimately concluded between Fifa and ISL… João Havelange was enriched to the extent of the commissions he received and failed, contrary to his duty, to pass on; Fifa suffered an equivalent loss.’
The prosecutor’s document continues: ‘There is nothing different about the conduct of Ricardo Teixeira, whose influence in Fifa was also of fundamental importance due to his close relationship (son-in-law) to João Havelange.’
Bribes had also been paid to Nicolás Leoz of Paraguay, who was later named in the report into the ISL bribes by the Fifa ethics committee. Issa Hayatou of Cameroon was another beneficiary, receiving a much smaller figure, 100,000 French francs, which he always claimed was for anniversary celebrations of the Confederation of African Football, not a bribe to him personally.
Yet there are many more awful, stinking truths trailing out of what happened, which have to be sifted and uncovered, from a forty-two-page document of Swiss-German legalese translated into clunky English. The revelations come in stages, general, then specific, exposing the underlying rottenness of the culture which Havelange grew in his years of unchallenged domination. Before laying out what was stolen, fixed, then covered up in the offices of Fifa House on the hill of Hitzigweg, the prosecutor’s document sets out what Fifa’s own statutes say about its sporting mission:
‘The purpose of Fifa is to improve football continuously and to broadcast it globally, whereby the binding effect on nations–as well as the educational, cultural and humanitarian status of football–has to be taken in consideration… According to the statutes of Fifa, it is a non-profit organisation.’
Allowing for the awkward translation, it is clear that the prosecutor meant that the world governing body’s central, expressed role is to bind nations together, and have an educational, cultural and humanitarian benefit around the world, through football. But, the order stated, this pure ideal of sport had been corrupted by paying bribes to influential decision-makers at governing bodies, as suspected, since the 1970s, ‘when sports became an important factor in the economy’. The court had been told this by a previous ISL chairman, unnamed, who said that after he was appointed as a director in the early 1990s, he had been told that ISL ‘had been using such practices since its foundation’ by Horst Dassler in 1982. That pinned the bribery of people in governing bodies to Dassler of Adidas himself, who was so industriously involved in the backroom political manoeuvrings at Fifa in the early 1970s, initially having been very close to Rous, then gravitating to Havelange.
‘The investigation revealed that the commission payments made by [ISL] could be traced back to the 1980s,’ the document, damningly, notes.
The previous ISL chairman, the order said, had told the court: ‘When he repeatedly insisted on stopping such favouritism, [the chairman’s] successor made clear to him that these personal relations had led to further existing commitments.’
The chief financial officer of ISL had bluntly stated that payments had to be made, on top of the buying of the actual rights to the sporting events, ‘to individuals who had helped conclude the contract’.
By the late 1990s, when the money for broadcasting dwarfed the sums which had obsessed Dassler, ISL had formed a fund in Liechtenstein, a secretive, offshore banking haven in the heart of Europe, and stuffed it with 36m CHF for the payment of bribes. Havelange asigned to ISL all of Fifa’s marketing rights–the right to sell its name and the irresistible appeal of football, to the familiar roster of blue-chip and junk food sponsors–in 1997 for 200m CHF. Then he signed over the 2002 and 2006 World Cup rights, ISL paying Fifa $1.4bn in total. This latter contract was signed ‘on behalf of Fifa by João Havelange’ on 26 May 1998, just days before the Brazilian stepped down as the president able to sign contracts for Fifa, and Blatter took over.
The multi-million-dollar bribes paid to Havelange and Teixeira in return for granting these contracts came to light not long after, when ISL went bust in 2001. Yet here came the next layer of shame: Fifa, with Blatter as president by then, Havelange honorary president, and Teixeira, Leoz and Hayatou all still on the executive committee, covered up the bribery, sealed it in a settlement. Fifa did not legally pursue the senior figures who had betrayed trust and enriched themselves, but sought to close down the whole affair and ensure it would never be raised again. The Zug court order states that this was done because, Fifa’s own lawyers had said, it did not want to suffer bad publicity: ‘Fifa expressed an interest, according to its own statement, not to be involved in speculations in connection with the bribery payments.’
So this was the thrust of the criminal proceedings: the Zug prosecutor was indeed accusing Havelange and Teixeira of ‘embezzlement, possibly disloyal management’. But he had also been accusing Fifa itself of covering up for the pair. Fifa, the order states, actually sacrificed huge money to which it was entitled, which Havelange and Teixeira had pocketed, and instead settled and looked after them.
‘Fifa refrained from enforcing its claim for surrender against João Havelange and Ricardo Teixeira who were, on the basis of their positions, obliged to surrender the assets [the money they took in bribes] to Fifa,’ the order recorded. ‘As a result, Fifa was damaged to the extent of its omission, which was in breach of its duty, while Ricardo Teixeira and João Havelange were thereby enriched to the same extent.’
The sequence of events began with the liquidator of the ISL collapse, when he discovered the 36m CHF slush fund for the payment of bribes, trying to get the money back as was right and natural. On 27 February 2004, Teixeira and Havelange agreed to repay some of it. The settlement does not look like a great achievement, requiring only 2.5m CHF from Teixeira; the court order does not explain why they were released from further action for so little. However, the Zug prosecutor became involved when his office saw that Fifa itself appeared to have paid this money on behalf of Teixeira. In return for the payment to the ISL liquidator, Fifa had sought a commitment that Havelange and Teixeira ‘will not be made subject to any further actions’. Fifa’s lawyer, who was not named, explained that football’s world governing body paid this settlement, on behalf of people who had effectively stolen from it, because it did not want to be subject to bad publicity about the bribery having happened.
‘That’s why Fifa intercedes to help bring about settlements where foreign football functionaries have received commission.’
This is as bald an admission as can be that Fifa accepted that ‘foreign football functionaries’ were regularly bribed, but that instead of taking the necessary action against them, clean up the game and stop it happening again, Fifa ‘intercedes’ to tolerate it and hush it up. That is why the prosecutor had become involved–he was accusing Fifa under Blatter of acting against its own interests, sporting purposes and mission, therefore ‘disloyally’, because its main objective in the scandal was to protect ‘certain of its members’ and their ‘personal, pecuniary advantages’, rather than ‘the alleged promotion of football’.
Fifa’s lawyer presented a list of reasons protesting that this was not the case, arguing that in fact it had been legitimate not to claim the money back from Teixeira and Havelange, and instead to settle the bribery claim on their behalf and keep the whole affair quiet. One of the reasons advanced is quite shocking, even amid all the other squalor of this exposed culture. The lawyer argued that if Fifa had decided to try and reclaim the money from the people who had pocketed the bribes, it would ‘barely have been possible’ to recover any of it. This, he argued, was because:
‘A claim made by Fifa in South America and Africa would hardly have been enforceable because bribery payments belong to the usual salary of the majority of the population.’
This bombshell is dropped, one sentence on page 32 of a dreadful document of record, and it is quite difficult to take in the full extent of its implications. Here was Fifa, in a court of law in its native Switzerland, stating, plain as day, that it believed bribery was part of the routine facts of life in South America and Africa. Fifa, which enjoys charitable and non-tax privileges in Switzerland, was partly controlled by the votes of its many African and South American football association delegates; it sends many millions of dollars to those continents every year for development, and in public always denied there was any corruption. Yet in court negotiations it never thought would be exposed, Fifa was actually mounting as a formal argument, a justification for not seeking repayment of Havelange and Teixeira’s kickbacks, that bribes are simply regarded as part of a person’s salary in those parts of the world.
The prosecutor did not engage with that argument. Instead the document dryly notes that Havelange and other members of the executive committee proven to have taken bribes did a significant part of their work in Switzerland, and so Fifa could have sued them in Switzerland.
The prosecutor, however, himself agreed that if they paid compensation to the court, there was no further public interest in mounting a prosecution against them. Fifa settled for paying 2.5m CHF; Teixeira agreed to pay the same, and Havelange the 500,000 CHF. They paid the money quite eagerly, 2.5m CHF from Fifa landing with the prosecutor’s office on 18 March 2010, and the proceedings were stopped; Fifa was not prosecuted for sanctioning and covering up bribery. The costs of reaching this settlement, to avoid prosecution, were paid by Fifa: 92,000 CHF.
The date of the deal was 11 May 2010. The BBC’s Panorama broadcast its programme, naming Teixeira, Leoz and Hayatou as alleged recipients of bribes, on the eve of the World Cup vote in December 2010, but the document was still not published until July 2012. I wrote about it for the Guardian on the day it was all laid bare. Sylvia Schenk, senior adviser on sport for Transparency International, the globally respected anti-corruption campaign, who had initially worked with Blatter on reform proposals, said his position was untenable.
‘If the president of Fifa for years did not act on the knowledge that these payments had been made for senior executives’ personal gain, and tried to hide it for as long as possible, then it is difficult to trust him as the person to reform Fifa in the future,’ she said.
Blatter, though, did not accept he had done anything wrong, publicly pointing out, as Fifa always has, the remarkable fact that paying and taking bribes were not in themselves criminal offences in Swiss law.
‘You can’t judge the past on the basis of today’s standards,’ he said, ‘otherwise it would end up with moral justice.’
That contradicted what the document itself revealed, that the prosecutor in Zug did believe the trousering of bribes by Teixeira and Havelange was criminal, ‘disloyal’ and ‘embezzlement’, and that Fifa, under the presidency of Blatter, was criminally ‘disloyal’ to its own sporting purposes in not having pursued repayment. Fifa and Teixeira denied criminal conduct; Havelange did not comment on the accusation of criminality.
This public confirmation that Horst Dassler’s ISL had for twenty years corrupted Fifa and its monumental former president, which was covered up by his protégé and successor, came to be considered by the new ethics committee structure agreed as part of the reforms. After his 2011 congress, when he had stood on the burning deck throwing out names and promises of reform into the winds of change in Zurich, Blatter did indeed follow some through. He had appointed Mark Pieth, a professor of criminal law at the Basel Institute, to look at Fifa’s structures and recommend improvements. We in the media had been suspicious, that a Swiss appointee might give Blatter’s house a superficial makeover, but Pieth turned out to be genuine, with a distinguished record of anti-corruption work and no interest in having a Fifa whitewash on his record.
One of Pieth’s recommendations, glaringly obvious to him, and accepted by Fifa, was that the ethics committee had to be more independent. The prosecution, judge and jury body acting on reports from the president’s office, which had dispatched his challenger, Mohamed bin Hammam, within days of receiving reports of the Trinidad cash, was no more. The ethics process was split, to use the chosen language, into two ‘chambers’. One was an ‘investigatory chamber’, which, as the name suggests, carried out the inquiries. It reported its findings to the ‘adjudicatory chamber’, which then decided how strong the evidence looked, and whether disciplinary action should be taken, pursued it if it was, and, if a person were found guilty, decided on the punishment.
The investigatory chamber was to be chaired by Michael Garcia, a former US prosecutor and lawyer based in New York. The adjudicatory chamber chairman was Hans-Joachim Eckert, a German judge with a long career of prosecuting organised and other serious financial crimes, in Munich. From 1999 to 2003, Eckert had led a department pursuing economic crimes, including from the Nazi era. From 2003, he had been presiding judge of the penal court in Munich, hearing cases of corruption and tax fraud.
This ISL settlement was the first major test of the newly constituted semi-independent ethics committee structure. Eckert looked at the bribes taken by Havelange and Teixeira, the extent of Blatter’s knowledge, Fifa’s conduct under Blatter in settling with ISL’s liquidator, then the settlement of Fifa’s own threatened prosecution with the 2.5m CHF payment by court order. Despite his formidable CV as a prosecutor and judge, the way it went gave no great cause for confidence in a new culture for Fifa. On 12 March 2012, while Eckert was still considering the case, Teixeira suddenly resigned from the presidency of the CBF, and therefore came off the Fifa executive committee. He also stepped down from chairing the organising committee of the World Cup due to kick off in Brazil two years later. Teixeira, sixty-four by then, did not say his resignation had anything to do with the revelations of the bribes he banked, or the pending verdict of the ethics committee; he said it was due to ill health.
That was the same reason Teixeira had given a decade earlier, when he avoided questioning by a Brazilian senate investigation into the CBF, following years of concerns and allegations of corruption. There were longstanding complaints that the brilliance of Brazil’s playing talent, its golden football heritage, were being betrayed by corrupt officials lining their own pockets. The former national team striker Romário, a stand-out star of the 1994 World Cup in the USA won by Brazil, was becoming a prominently forthright critic, a senator, speaking with the voice of exasperated experience. Teixeira, citing ill health, stepped down when his time came for an appearance before the senate, and his deputy sustained the inquisition instead.
When the senate committee delivered its 1,600-page-long conclusions in December 2001, its chairman, Álvaro Dias, famously described the CBF under Teixeira as: ‘Truly a den of crime, revealing disorganisation, anarchy, incompetence and dishonesty.’
Alex Bellos, the journalist reporting on the inquiry for the Guardian at the time, who later wrote a book, Futebol, about the wonders and ugliness of the beautiful game in Brazil, said that the game’s bosses ‘have long been symbols of authoritarianism and impunity, one of the last areas of public life to modernise since the [military] dictatorship ended in 1985’.
Teixeira had won an election for the presidency of the CBF in 1989, four years after the end of the dictatorship in which Havelange himself had flourished and been supported by the military generals. In the senate report, Teixeira was heavily criticised, accused of taking unauthorised salaries and of corruption, and of having bought power and political influence, for protection in the country. The inquiry called for him and other senior CBF figures to be prosecuted for alleged crimes including tax evasion and money laundering, but no charges were brought and no formal action was taken following this extensive investigation. Teixeira, who always denied wrongdoing, recovered from his bout of ill health, and remained the CBF president and on the Fifa executive committee right up to his resignation in March 2013.
The news that Havelange had also resigned came on the day Eckert delivered his verdict, 30 April 2013. The ethics committee report stated that Havelange, ninety-six by then, had actually stepped down from his position as honorary president twelve days before, on 18 April–the very day that the Concacaf integrity committee was delivering its devastating findings of fraud by Jack Warner over the Dr João Havelange Centre of Excellence. Havelange’s reputation, record and legacy were sunk, here at the end of a long and epic life, but his resignation put him beyond the reach of any sanction.
Leoz, another Fifa boss in South America, president of the confederation, Conmebol, for a staggering twenty-seven years, member of the Fifa executive committee since 1998, also resigned, citing ‘health and personal grounds’. That came on 24 April 2013, six days before Eckert’s report. In it, Eckert noted the resignations of both Havelange and Leoz–not Teixeira, an omission which was not explained–and confirmed that he believed that put them beyond sanction:
‘Any further steps are superfluous.’
It was just one element of a judgement which was poorly explained and deeply unconvincing.
In the new ethics committee split, Eckert had received a report from Garcia into the ISL bribes, Fifa cover-up and the extent of Blatter’s knowledge. He recommended no action be taken against anyone. Eckert’s report was, though, plain-speaking about the payments made by ISL to the Fifa president of twenty-four years, the CBF boss and the president of Conmebol:
‘From money that passed through the [ISL] group, it is certain that not inconsiderable amounts were channelled to former Fifa president Havelange and to his son-in-law Ricardo Teixeira as well as to Dr Nicolás Leoz, whereby there is no indication that any form of service was given in return by them,’ Eckert concluded.
‘These payments were apparently made via front companies in order to cover up the true recipient and are to be qualified as “commissions”, known today as “bribes”.’
It is difficult now, with so many towering Fifa names demolished by exposed corruption, to remember how significant that simple admission was, as recently as 2013. Finally, after all the years of cover-up and denial in Zurich, this new ethics committee within Fifa itself had come out with it, in a public statement: these were bribes. For years, millions had indeed been paid, as a matter of course and endemic culture, from the Swiss rights company founded by Dassler, to the president himself and his clan.
Eckert then rehearsed the argument that being paid bribes was not a crime in Swiss law at the time; it was regarded as commission. This seemed to be at odds with the view of the prosecutor who had been convinced there were grounds for a criminal case, but Eckert was apparently persuaded by it.
‘However,’ he judged, ‘it is clear that Havelange and Teixeira, as football officials, should not have accepted any bribe money, and should have had to pay it back since the money was in connection with the exploitation of media rights.
‘[The fact that it was not a crime in Switzerland at the time] does not change anything with regard to the morally and ethically reproachable conduct of both persons,’ Eckert stated.
On Blatter, Eckert went out of his way to clear Havelange’s successor of taking bribes himself, even though that had not been suggested. Blatter has always said, throughout the unmasking of corruption at the heart of Fifa, that he never took any money improperly himself. Eckert supported this, on the basis of the documents he had seen: ‘There are also no indications whatsoever that President Blatter was responsible for a cash flow to Havelange, Teixeira or Leoz, or that he himself received any payments from the ISL group, even in the form of hidden kickback payments.’
Then Eckert went on to clear Blatter of knowing about the bribes to Havelange. He referred to the UBS bank transfer, which showed that, on 3 March 1997, a payment of 1.5m CHF was sent by ISL to a Fifa account, with a note that it related to ‘a guarantee for Mr Havelange’. Eckert recited that: ‘It is undisputed that the former chief accountant of Fifa brought this to the attention of then secretary general Blatter, and the former arranged for the return transfer to ISL.’
When Blatter was shown this payment to Havelange from ISL, a company bidding for and buying Fifa’s marketing and TV rights, he was extremely experienced in the ways of Fifa and the sports rights world. After an initial career in other sports governing bodies and at Longines, he had been at Fifa for twenty-two years, secretary general under Havelange for nineteen, and was ready, just one year away, from standing to take the top job himself. Yet about this payment, when interviewed by Garcia, he was nonplussed. He ‘couldn’t understand that somebody is sending money to Fifa for another person’, Eckert’s report states.
‘But at that time,’ Eckert records solemnly, ‘[Blatter] did not suspect the payment was a commission.’
The accusation made against Blatter by many observers of this episode is that he must have known this payment was improper. Even he had acknowledged, when he said he couldn’t understand it, that there was no explicable reason for it. The same suspicion prevails against him now, that even though there is still, to be fair, no evidence of him taking bribes while those around him were helping themselves insatiably, he must have known. That Warner, his arch-supporter, was a fraud and embezzler, including of massive money from Fifa, that bin Hammam was a payer of bribes, that Havelange, Teixeira, Leoz were all at it. He denies it; says, in effect, he knew nothing.
The further accusation is that, faced with this payment which had no explanation, he should have confronted Havelange about it, found out the truth of what was passing under his nose at Fifa. That he should have blown the whistle on it, because it was clearly bribery and corruption, as a culture. Blatter, though, does not do whistleblowing, as he would tell me in my interview with him for this book.
Eckert’s summary of all this was that perhaps Blatter should have sought some ‘clarification’ of what the payment was for, but, ‘President Blatter’s conduct could not be classified in any way as misconduct with regard to any ethics rules.’
Without explaining that conclusion further, Eckert decided: ‘The conduct of President Blatter may have been clumsy because there could be an internal need for clarification, but this does not lead to any criminal or ethical misconduct.’
And there it was. Blatter, Havelange’s trusty secretary general through the 1980s and 1990s, as Fifa sold sponsorships for millions of dollars to multinationals, TV rights for ever-burgeoning fortunes and did exclusive deals with its entwined agency ISL, had been ‘clumsy’ when he did nothing about the 1.5m CHF payment from ISL for Havelange. Nobody had ever thought Sepp Blatter had got where he was in the world by being clumsy. Rather, he was always considered exceptionally smart in a formidably complex web of global sport, huge money flows, intricate power politics and personal alliances, but ‘clumsy’ was the verdict of the German judge.
Of Fifa’s cover-up under president Blatter in 2004, Eckert did actually conclude that Havelange and Teixeira would have had to pay back the money they pocketed, at least 41m CHF, if Fifa had demanded it. However, the judge said that Fifa ‘was under no obligation to demand the repayment of this money’, and that it was ‘within Fifa’s discretion in applying its business judgement to decide whether to seek repayment’.
Blatter had actually told Garcia that he had not authorised the lawyer who had made the settlement of 2.5m CHF on Fifa’s behalf, for the whole issue to go away and to avoid publicity. Eckert did indulge that possibility, saying that ‘it could not be determined with certainty’ that this lawyer had involved Blatter in the ‘deliberations and decisions’. So it was possible that the president of Fifa, contemplating the catastrophic insolvency of ISL and the revelation that his predecessor and senior supporters on the executive committee had taken bribes, was not involved in the discussions of what to do about it, or the decision finally to settle it and hush it all up.
Eckert said that he did agree with Garcia that this settlement ‘may very well be seen to have been affected by a conflict of interest’. But Eckert then explained why he was not recommending any action be taken about this: ‘At the time of… the settlement [in February 2004], there were no ethics rules.’
So neither Blatter nor anybody else could be held accountable within Fifa for the settlement, which meant Fifa allowed Havelange, Teixeira and Leoz to keep the money they took in bribes, because there had been no explicit, written ‘ethics rules’ at the time. And the fact that these former barons had resigned from their positions appeared to satisfy Eckert that, like other ‘major corruption proceedings’ involving German or US companies, the employees guilty of bribe-taking had been removed.
‘No further proceedings related to the ISL matter are warranted against any other football official,’ he concluded–and none ever were.
Havelange had reached the age of ninety-six but was finally exposed; Teixeira had dodged accusations in Brazil but was damned by this. Leoz claimed he had passed on the ISL money to a school project in Paraguay in January 2008, eight years after he received it, but he had not been ‘fully candid’, Eckert said. Warner and Blazer had been all but finished two weeks earlier by the Concacaf integrity committee. Mohamed bin Hammam was already banned for life following the PWC report into his beneficence with Asian Football Confederation money.
Yet Blatter emerged with only a scratch; ‘clumsy’ but cleared, from an inquiry and court proceedings which established that corruption had been soaked into Fifa’s culture in Zurich, in Europe, for at least two decades in which he worked throughout as the secretary general. He welcomed Eckert’s verdict ‘with satisfaction’, that he had been exonerated. Blatter was home free, to scan the horizon and consider the future, and he began to assess that only he could navigate Fifa through its uncertainties, that he should stand to be at the helm yet again.