By Samuel Rubenfeld
(adapted)
The ethics committee of international soccer’s governing body said Thursday it opened an investigation into 16 Caribbean soccer officials over allegations they took bribes from a former presidential candidate at a meeting in Trinidad & Tobago in May.
The Fédération Internationale de Football Association is looking into whether the 16 officials, who are from the Caribbean Football Union, each took $40,000 in cash in brown bags from Mohamed Bin Hammam in exchange for their votes in a June 1 FIFA presidential election.
Hammam is appealing a lifetime ban he received for allegedly organizing the bribes through Jack Warner, who left soccer, leading FIFA to drop its investigation into him.
Judge Robert T. Torres, a member of the ethics committee, will lead the probe into the Caribbean officials, which will be conducted by a company owned by former U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Louis Freeh.
Evidence of the alleged bribes came from whistleblowers, including Chuck Blazer and Fred Lunn, a Bahamanian official who took a photo of the cash he received before returning it.
Meanwhile Chuck Blazer, member of FIFA’s executive committee and general secretary of CONCACAF, himself is coming into line of investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) who is examining documents recording more than $500,000 in payments made by the Caribbean Football Union (CFU) according to Reuters.
Freeh conducted an initial investigation in June for FIFA, and invited officials in for questioning in Miami or the Bahamas. Some didn’t attend either session, while others attended and denied that any corruption took place in Trinidad, according to an AP report.
Announcing the investigation wasn’t the only action FIFA took Thursday.
The body’s ethics committee chairman provisionally suspended Colin Klass of Guyana, an ally of Warner’s who is a member of the CFU executive committee, “after consideration of the specific information received on this matter.”
Klass, according to a report from ESPN Soccernet, told FIFA investigators in June there was no offer or talk about cash gifts at the Trinidad meeting. He is among the officials announced Thursday as being under investigation.
Also named by FIFA were Dominican soccer federation president Osiris Guzman and vice president Felix Ledesma. Guzman told the AP that he hadn’t been contacted by FIFA, while Ledesma denied being offered bribes to vote for bin Hammam.
“I never received any offers. I think this is all a political case,” he told the AP.
After the ban on Hammam, FIFA gave the CFU officials 48 hours to bring it information related to the meeting, or “be subject to the full range of sanctions.”
FIFA said the 16 officials will be invited for questioning related to the allegations. The soccer body noted that the investigations against the officials are ongoing.
“It is therefore possible that further proceedings could be opened in the future,” FIFA said.
The 16 officials currently being questioned are as follows:
David Hinds, Mark Bob Forde (Barbados)
Franka Pickering, Aubrey Liburd (British Virgin Islands)
David Frederick (Cayman Islands)
Osiris Guzman, Felix Ledesma (Dominican Republic)
Colin Klass, Noel Adonis (Guyana)
Yves Jean-Bart (Haiti)
Anthony Johnson (St. Kitts and Nevis)
Patrick Mathurin (St. Lucia)
Joseph Delves, Ian Hypolite (St. Vincent and the Grenadines)
Richard Groden (Trinidad and Tobago)
Hillaren Frederick (US Virgin Islands)
