“[W]e anticipate additional arrests, indictments and/or pleas,” IRS Criminal Investigation Division chief Richard Weber told Bloomberg. Weber declined to say who or how many people might be arrested, and wouldn’t speculate on the timeline for the case’s expansion. But other reports from the weekend and comments from Swiss prosecutors suggest the scandal won’t stay contained to the specific bribery charges leveled Wednesday by Attorney General Loretta Lynch.
The indictment and arrests Wednesday focused on corporate executives and international soccer officials from CONCACAF, the North and Central American federation that includes the United States. FIFA’s immediate response in the press portrayed itself as the victim of CONCACAF officials’ crimes. But the case may soon lead prosecutors into FIFA’s inner sanctum, according to a Wall Street Journal report.
Key executives would have had to sign off on three of the large cash transfers detailed in last week’s indictment over alleged bribery in the 2010 World Cup host selection process, sources familiar with FIFA’s internal policies for high-dollar payments told the paper. Such signatures could allow prosecutors to draw FIFA’s headquarters into the current case as well.
Swiss prosecutors have hinted that they are pursuing FIFA’s own top men for charges related to future World Cups. “It is suspected that irregularities occurred in the allocation of the FIFA World Cups of 2018 and 2022” in Russia and Qatar respectively, Switzerland’s top law enforcement officer said in a Wednesday statement. Qatar beat out the United States for hosting the 2022 cup on a 14-8 vote by FIFA’s 22-member executive committee.
The Qatari World Cup has already drawn substantial criticism and attention over the use of barely-paid migrant workers in building the many facilities required to host the world’s premier sports event in a climate where average temperatures top 100 degrees in the summer months when the cup is traditionally played. FIFA has said the 2022 tournament will be moved to the winter months to avoid temperatures that commonly spike to over 120 degrees in June and July. But that means disrupting club season schedules around the world in order to play in the relative cool of a Doha January.
The stadiums and hotels that Qatar needs to host the tournament are being built by migrant workers whose employers confiscate their passports and pay them just a few dollars per day. The workers die at a rate of one every two days according to The Guardian, not just in construction accidents but from sheer exhaustion at working 15-hour days in the desert heat. Broadcasters with financial ties to Qatar have pushed back on that report and portrayed the country’s preparations glowingly, but the International Trade Union Confederation predicts 4,000 workers will die building Qatar’s World Cup infrastructure. Soccer fans worldwide have pushed back on the allegedly appalling labor conditions and absurd on-field dynamics of putting the cup in Qatar even before the country even submitted its bid, and many speculate that the Qataris must have greased some FIFA palms in order to win the vote.
Qatar’s appetite for making an international splash through sports is voracious and well-documented. The tiny emirate effectively bought entry into the upper echelons of Olympic weightlifting and distance running, giving passports and new names to Kenyan runners and burly Bulgarians willing to compete under the Qatari flag at the 2004 Athens games. Qatari money has flowed into club soccer on various continents as well, fueling French side Paris St. Germain’s rise as a global powerhouse and pushing F.C. Barcelona to replace UNICEF with Qatar Airways as its jersey sponsor.
Whatever goodwill or brand familiarity the country and its companies have built with those investments could evaporate if the case against FIFA expands from CONCACAF and the South African cup bid in 2010 to European officials and the Qatari bidding process. One government official in the U.K. has already called on the English Football Association to boycott the 2018 tournament in Russia over FIFA corruption concerns, and the Russian tournament is not even linked to the FBI investigation that produced Wednesday’s arrests.
Rumors have swirled that FIFA officials sought bribes to vote for the Qatari bid for years, based on reports in the British media. FIFA commissioned former U.S. Attorney Michael Garcia to investigate those reports, and claimed that his findings vindicated the bid. But it has refused to release the full Garcia report, and Garcia himself has sharply criticized FIFA’s public portrayal of his findings. He said FIFA’s “42-page summary of his 430-page report contained ‘numerous materially incomplete and erroneous representations of the facts’,” The Guardian reported at the time.
With international labor groups maintaining a drumbeat of criticism over Qatar’s treatment of migrant workers ahead of the 2022 cup, and FIFA’s own exoneration of the Qatar decision shadowed by Garcia’s criticisms, hard evidence of bribery from the Swiss investigation could be enough to wrest the tournament away from the tiny natural gas-rich nation. Such a relocation would be the first in over four decades, after the 1986 cup was moved from Colombia to Mexico.
