Blatter relents to release dossier which may expose corruption

FIFA’s clean-up drive could see three senior football officials named as having received kickbacks from a company that sold World Cup TV rights.

Fifa president Sepp Blatter yesterday announced that the infamous ISL court dossier will be opened and handed to an independent body to study to see if any officials should face action.

For the last two years Fifa has helped block the publication of the court documents but Blatter said yesterday that the dossier would now be handed over.

He also revealed a programme of reforms to be carried out over two years, including the vetting of committee members, changing statutes and strengthening the ethics committee, a watchdog body.

The controversial court case in the Swiss canton of Zug involved Fifa’s now defunct marketing company, ISL, which was settled in 2009 after three parties, including Fifa, paid compensation of £2.9 million on the understanding that the names would remain secret.

After advice from the pressure group Transparency International, Blatter has now decided to open it up to scrutiny. He said: “The executive committee has at my request agreed that in the meeting of 16-17 December we will reopen this file. If there are any measures to be taken they will not be taken by the executive committee so we will give this file to an independent organisation outside of Fifa so they can delve into [it] and extract its conclusions and present them to us.”

BBC’s Panorama reported in May that the court file shows Brazil’s Fifa member Ricardo Teixeira and former Fifa president Joao Havelange received payments. Paraguay’s Fifa member Nicolas Leoz was named in the court in 2008 as having received £81,500.

The reform timetable will see three task forces set up to propose and implement reforms over the next two years, and they will report to a new watchdog body called the “good governance committee”. “Let us work for transparency, let us work for anti-corruption and let us go through the timetable we have now and look forward to how we manage that,” said Blatter.

Transparency International’s sports adviser Sylvia Schenk said the announcement of the timetable of reform was “a very good result”. She added: “But it is a first step. A starting point. After today they can’t go back. It will be a catastrophe if they go back.”

Blatter also confirmed his proposals made in June for all 208 national associations to vote on World Cup hosts, instead of just the executive committee, and for a woman to be co-opted onto the executive committee.