Prince William and David Cameron caught up in FIFA corruption scandal

We’re sorry, this feature is currently unavailable. We’re working to restore it. Please try again later.

Advertisement

This was published 6 years ago

Prince William and David Cameron caught up in FIFA corruption scandal

By Robert Mendick and Ben Rumsby
Updated

Prince William and David Cameron have become embroiled in the football corruption row as the full extent of England's failed attempt to stage the 2018 World Cup was made public.

The former Prime Minister and Prince William were at a meeting during which a vote-swapping deal between England and South Korea was discussed, according to an official report released on Tuesday night.

The long-awaited FIFA report has disclosed the lengths to which England's football bosses went to court FIFA executives, many of them now discredited, as they sought to secure votes for England's 2018 bid.

At one point officials discussed the possibility of arranging a meeting with the Queen for a FIFA representative whose vote could have helped England.

Former PM David Cameron with Prince William.

Former PM David Cameron with Prince William.Credit: AP

The report reveals how Mr Cameron asked the South Korean delegation to back England's bid, only to be told that England would have to agree to reciprocate by pledging support for South Korea's bid to host the 2022 tournament.

Such a vote-swapping deal, the report concluded, was in "violation of the anti-collusion rules". The report, written in 2014 by FIFA's then chief ethics investigator Michael Garcia, details how England bid officials interacted with FIFA officials in the run-up to the vote.

It discloses how they were asked to bestow an honorary knighthood and arrange an audience with the Queen for one South American official.

England 2018 officials arranged jobs at Aston Villa and Tottenham Hotspur football clubs for the "adopted son" of one official. They even considered a request by the same official, the Trinidad and Tobago FIFA vice-president Jack Warner, to have his home town twinned with an "English village". The FA offered Burton upon Trent, in Staffordshire, as a potential twin town.

Advertisement
Set to appeal: Michael Garcia.

Set to appeal: Michael Garcia.Credit: AP

The report discloses how Mr Cameron met FIFA vice-president Mong-Joon Chung of South Korea in Prince William's suite at the Baur au lac Hotel in Zurich on the eve of the vote in December 2010.

"The Prime Minister asked Mr Chung to vote for England's bid, and Mr Chung responded that he would if Mr [Geoff] Thompson [chairman of England's bid] voted for Korea [to host the 2022 tournament]," states the report.

The Queen is also named in the report after it emerged that FA chiefs met a senior FIFA official in 2009 who asked for an audience with the monarch. It is alleged that Nicolas Leoz, president of the South American Football Confederation, suggested the possibility of an honorary knighthood.

In the meeting with Lord Triesman, the then FA chairman, it is alleged that Dr Leoz said that "he believed that a knighthood from the United Kingdom would be appropriate".

The attempts to court Mr Warner, then a FIFA vice-president and president of North, Central American and Caribbean football confederation, and his astonishing demands are also revealed in full for the first time.

"England 2018's response shows an unfortunate willingness, time and again, to meet that expectation [of Mr Warner]," the report concludes.

England were knocked out in the first round after receiving only two votes.

Garcia report leaked

FIFA took the dramatic step of publishing the report after it was leaked to German newspaper Bild this week. The report's contents have been kept secret until Bild obtained a copy and started publishing it on Tuesday.

The first set of revelations from the report were not particularly new but still painted a bleak picture of the background to the infamous 2010 vote that gave the 2018 World Cup to Russia and the 2022 World Cup to Qatar.

More damning revelations about the Qatari bid, however, were expected from Bild on Wednesday, only for FIFA to spike its guns by publishing the whole report on its website.

In a statement, FIFA said the new bosses of its independent ethics committee, chief investigator Maria Claudia Rojas and lead judge Vassilios Skouris, had taken the decision.

It said FIFA president Gianni Infantino and the current members of the FIFA Council had been calling for this move for over a year but had been blocked by the predecessors of Rojas and Skouris, Cornel Borbely and Hans-Joachim Eckert, who were unceremoniously replaced last month.

Borbely co-authored the report with Garcia, and Eckert wrote a highly contentious 42-page "summary" of the report which Garcia immediately disowned, before resigning.

The FIFA statement added: "The ethics committee will meet in its full composition under the new chairpersons for the first time next week, and it was already planned to use this opportunity to discuss the publication of the report.

"However, as the document has been illegally leaked to a German newspaper, the new chairpersons have requested the immediate publication of the full report (including the reports on the Russian and US bid teams, which were conducted by Mr Borbely alone) in order to avoid the dissemination of any misleading information.

Loading

"For the sake of transparency, FIFA welcomes the news that this report has now been finally published."

Telegraph, London with AP

Most Viewed in Sport

Loading