Fifa has lodged a criminal complaint against individuals connected to the bids to host the next two World Cups.<\/p>\n
President Sepp Blatter has acted on the advice of judge Hans-Joachim Eckert, whose report cleared Russia and Qatar to host the 2018 and 2022 tournaments.<\/p>\n
“There is insufficient incriminating evidence to call into question the whole bidding process,” said Eckert.<\/p>\n
Although the report has been widely criticised, Blatter has resisted calls for it to be made public.<\/p>\n
“If Fifa were to publish the report, we would be violating our own association law as well as state law,” he said.<\/p>\n
However, Fifa do have significant areas of concern.<\/p>\n
In a statement, it said: “There seem to be grounds for suspicion that, in isolated cases, international transfers of assets with connections to Switzerland took place, which merit examination by the criminal prosecution authorities.”<\/p>\n
Blatter said the move shows Fifa is not opposed to transparency.<\/p>\n
He added: “If we had anything to hide, we would hardly be taking this matter to the Office of the Attorney General.”<\/p>\n
Eckert confirmed he had advised Fifa that a criminal complaint be lodged at or around the same time he produced his report last week.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Source: BBC<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Fifa has lodged a criminal complaint against individuals connected to the bids to host the next two World Cups. President Sepp Blatter has acted on the advice of judge Hans-Joachim Eckert, whose report cleared Russia and Qatar to host the 2018 and 2022 tournaments. “There is insufficient incriminating evidence to call into question the whole […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":29881,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[29,3],"class_list":["post-66257","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-dr-mahamudu-bawumia","tag-ghana-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66257","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=66257"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66257\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/29881"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=66257"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=66257"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=66257"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}