‘FIFA approved £35,000 gala dinner’

England’s senior official for their 2018 World Cup bid, Simon Johnson, has said that FIFA were made aware of the payments that have come under fire from the World Cup bidding report.

The 42-page summary by German judge Hans-Joachim Eckert, chairman of the adjudicatory chamber of FIFA’s independent ethics committee, said the England 2018 team “violated bidding rules”, including helping to secure a job in the UK for a family friend of disgraced former FIFA vice-president Jack Warner, and damaged “the image of FIFA and the bidding process”.

In particular it pointed out out that England’s bid team had spent £35,000 on a gala dinner for Warner and Caribbean Football Union officials.

The report, which cleared Qatar and Russia to host the 2022 and 2018 World Cups, left England as the main target. But Johnson insists that their 2018 bid followed the rules.

“We were fully aware of the rules of the code of ethics,” Johnson told the Sunday Telegraph. “Where there was a bid activity that we felt raised questions, we would have that activity pre-approved by FIFA using the official email address it provided for these purposes. It is my recollection that the CFU dinner was approved in this way.”

Chief ethics investigator Michael Garcia announced he is to appeal against Eckert’s findings and said the decision “contained numerous materially incomplete and erroneous representations of the facts and conclusions detailed in the investigatory chamber’s report”.

Indeed, a number of high ranking officials have called for the full report to be released – including Premier League chief executive Richard Scudamore.

Last week, Football Association chairman Greg Dyke described the report as “a joke” and Lord Triesman, who was chairman of the FA at the time of the bid, told the BBC: “I think that the report is extraordinary. It reflects the fact that, in FIFA, there is a great dislike of England, but the crucial thing here is that the evidence is never really going to be produced in a way it would be in a proper court of law. For those reasons, who did what and how badly they behaved is never going to be that clear.”

“I’d like to have seen the original document which was produced by Mr Garcia and I’m never satisfied by seeing summaries by somebody else.

“I think in this day and age people are entitled to see the original, but what I do think is true from the report is that there are many areas where he, in effect, says there’s a knife-edge distinction between doing it properly, but spreading a lot of money around, and things that are corrupt that it just shows you just how much the FIFA act has got to be cleaned up.”

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