Issa Hayatou of Cameroon and Jacques Anouma of the Ivory Coast were allegedly paid US$1.5 million to vote for Qatar, according to evidence submitted to a British parliamentary inquiry by The Sunday Times newspaper. The inquiry also heard from the former head of England's 2018 bid, Lord Triesman, who described the conduct of executive committee members Jack Warner, Nicolas Leoz, Ricardo Teixeira and Worawi Makudi in the World Cup tender as “improper and unethical”.
“The Qatar Football Association is disappointed by the publication today on the UK Parliament’s Culture, Media and Sport Committee website of evidence provided to the Committee by The Sunday Times which contains serious and baseless allegations against us. We categorically deny these allegations,” read a QFA statement released on Tuesday evening. “As The Sunday Times itself states, these accusations ‘were and remain unproven’. They will remain unproven, because they are false.”
The statement added: “The evidence from The Sunday Times states that it did not publish the allegations themselves since ‘none of the three people who made the allegations against us was ever likely to be willing to appear as a witness’. In fact, the newspaper could easily have published the allegations had they thought that it could be shown that it was responsible and in the public interest to do so.”
The QFA continued: “In the event, they plainly concluded that the accounts of these people were not a reliable basis to publish these allegations. Indeed, these accounts are evidently wholly unreliable.” In October, The Sunday Times published details of an undercover investigation that led to two of FIFA's 24-man Executive Committee members – Amos Adamu of Nigeria and Reynald Tamarii of Tahiti – being suspended.
In Zurich, FIFA president Sepp Blatter said he would ask for evidence to support the claims and would forward any allegations to the FIFA ethics committee for investigation. “I cannot say they are all angels or they are all devils,” he said of the Executive Committee members. “We must have the evidence and then we will act immediately against all those (who) would be breach of the ethical code rules.”
