THE CORRUPTION SCANDAL currently engulfing world football has taken another twist this afternoon with reports claiming the German Football Federation paid Fifa to stage the 2006 World Cup.
According to a report published in German magazine Der Spiegel, a €9 million fund was used to pay for the votes of four Asian members of the Fifa executive committee.
The weekly publication also claimed the bribes were funded by a loan from the then CEO of German sportswear giant Adidas, Robert Louis-Dreyfus, who died in 2009.
Germany saw off South Africa by 12 votes to 11 to win the right to hold the 2006 World Cup, with South Africa going on to stage the 2010 edition.
Two of the four Asians refused to answer Spiegel’s questions, one is now deceased while the fourth, South Korean Chung Moon-joon, who eight days ago was suspended for six years by Fifa’s ethics committee, deemed the issue not important enough to answer.
“In what could turn out to be the greatest crisis in German football since the Bundesliga bribery scandal of the 1970s, SPIEGEL has learned that the decision to award the 2006 World Cup to Germany was likely bought in the form of bribes,” the magazine’s report said.
Spriegel further claimed that the German Football Federation (DFB) then used a Fifa account in Geneva to pay Louis-Dreyfus back.
It’s also said the World Cup organising committee chairman Franz Beckenbauer, a German football legend, and current DFB president Wolfgang Niersbach, who was then the secretary general of that organisation, were both aware of the payment.
Shortly after the claims came to light, the DFB announced it was also investigating a €6.7 million payment from its World Cup organising committee to Fifa.
The payment was unearthed by the DFB during an internal investigation into the awarding of the World Cup prompted by the wave of scandal engulfing the world’s governing body.
The DFB explained that in the course of their probe to ensure nothing amiss had occurred during the bidding process “it had come across a 6.7 million euros payment made to Fifa in April 2005, money which could have been used for something else other than its original intended target (Fifa’s cultural programme).”
The DFB stressed: “The payment was not connected with the awarding (of the 2006 World Cup) made almost five years earlier.”
Today’s revelations means the bidding process for every World Cup since Italy 1990 has now been implicated in some form of financial misconduct.
The DFB, however, said they had found no “irregularities” in Germany’s winning bid to stage the football showpiece. The DFB also said it is investigating the possibility of recuperating the €6.7 million.
“It is necessary to shine the light on these accusations. Football fans have the right to that,” German minister of justice Heiko Maas told Saturday’s edition of Bild.
With reporting by © AFP 2015.
