Qatar hits back at 'baseless' World Cup 2022 corruption allegations

15 June 2014

Qatar’s World Cup organising committee says corruption allegations are attempt to prejudice investigation

The Qatar 2020 World Cup organising committee has issued a statement strongly rejecting the corruption allegations that have been lodged against the country, referring to them as ‘baseless and riddled with innuendo’.

Saying that it expects “further attacks” on Qatar and its successful bid to host the football tournament, the committee said the constant stream of allegations are a series of “tenuous links that attempt to assume guilt by association”.

The committee said it believes the timing of the release of the recent allegations “are not an attempt to shine light on the 2018/2022 bidding”, but instead are “a flagrant attempt to prejudice an ongoing independent Investigation” by former New York attorney Michael Garcia.

“This has become a pattern prior to important dates in the Fifa calendar,” the statement said. “Certainly, if the source of these leaks was genuinely concerned with the evidence, they would have provided the leaked documents to Mr Garcia, as he requested, instead offering them to the media.”

The committee also tried to clarify its relationship with Mohamed bin Hammam, the former Qatari Fifa executive who allegedly paid $5m in bribes to secure support for Qatar’s successful campaign. Having previously said that Bin Hamman played no role in the bid, the organisers now say they had “never denied we had a relationship with Mr Bin Hammam” and that, as he was a voting Fifa executive and the Asian Football Confederation president, it was “important for us to maintain a working relationship with him”.

“But let us be clear: Mr Bin Hammam is from Qatar, but he was not a member of Qatar’s bid team,” the statement said. “None of this was improper. We hoped, of course, that Mr Bin Hammam would support our bid. But we hoped for the same from every executive committee member.”

Fifa has announced that its investigation of Doha’s successful bid will be completed by 9 June.

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