FIFA to vote on releasing World Cup corruption report

FIFA face a vote next week on whether or not to publish the controversial and sensitive report into alleged corruption during the bidding for the 2018 and 2022 World Cups, it was claimed Thursday.
The sport's world governing body will discuss the matter at its two-day executive committee meeting being held on the sidelines of the Club World Cup in Morocco on December 18 and 19.
The agenda released on Thursday for the meeting will hear a proposal submitted by Theo Zwanziger, the former head of the German football association and a powerful critic of the decision to award the 2022 World Cup to Qatar.
Britain's Daily Telegraph claimed that Zwanziger wants a redacted version of the full Ethics Committee report published to protect the identities of witnesses who co-operated with the probe led by US lawyer Michael Garcia.
Garcia carried out an 18-month investigation into the bidding which led to the controversial awarding of the 2018 World Cup to Russia and the 2022 tournament to Qatar.
The former New York federal prosecutor's 350-page report summed up an investigation that involved interviewing more than 75 witnesses and compiling a dossier with more than 200,000 pages and audio interviews.
However, Garcia blasted as "incomplete and erroneous" a subsequent version of his report.
German judge Hans-Joachim Eckert, chairman of the adjudicatory chamber of FIFA's independent ethics committee, said that the investigation had not yielded evidence of corruption and there would be no re-vote on awarding the tournaments.
He also argued that Garcia's report could not be published for legal reasons.
Source: AFP