Garcia Report

• 1. Introduction

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  The Garcia Report was a 350-page investigation into corruption at the heart of world football, produced by U.S. lawyer Michael J. Garcia. It took years to compile, was seen by only a handful of people, and when a summary of it finally arrived in November 2014, the man who wrote it immediately called that summary wrong. The questions hanging over this story are the kind that rarely get clean answers: who awarded the right to host the 2018 and 2022 World Cups, and did money change hands to make it happen? What does it mean when an ethics investigation produces a report that an ethics committee then refuses to publish? And why would the investigator himself resign in protest of the very process he was appointed to run?

• 2. Appointment and First Cases

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  On the 17th of July 2012, FIFA's president Sepp Blatter announced anti-corruption reforms, and the organization moved quickly to staff a new Ethics Committee. Michael J. Garcia, a former United States Attorney, was named chairman of the investigative chamber. Hans-Joachim Eckert, a German judge, was appointed to lead the adjudication chamber alongside him. The Guardian described the two men as "key independent figures from outside the so-called 'football family' who can help restore FIFA's credibility after bribery and vote-buying scandals."

  Before Garcia could turn to the World Cup bids, he and Eckert were immediately tasked with an older matter. FIFA's former marketing partner, International Sports and Leisure, had specialized in buying and selling broadcast rights to FIFA events on contracts worth millions of dollars. The investigation determined that ISL had made bribes to officials between 1992 and 2000. The case was closed on the 30th of April 2014, with Eckert ruling that former FIFA President Joao Havelange, former Executive Committee member Ricardo Teixeira, and Nicolas Leoz, the then-President of CONMEBOL, had received those bribes. Because Havelange and Leoz had already resigned their posts earlier that April, no further action was taken against them. Blatter, by contrast, was cleared of criminal or ethical misconduct, though Eckert's ruling described him as "clumsy" and asked whether he "knew or should have known over the years before the bankruptcy of ISL that ISL had made bribes to other FIFA officials."

  That first closed case set a pattern that would recur throughout the Garcia investigation: findings that stopped short of the most powerful figures, and outcomes that critics found too convenient.

• 3. The World Cup Bid Investigation

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  The decision to award the 2018 World Cup to Russia and the 2022 World Cup to Qatar had been made in December 2010. By August 2012, Garcia had declared his intention to examine that bidding process in full. The allegations were not vague. In May 2011, David Triesman, the former chairman of England's 2018 bid, told a British parliamentary inquiry that four FIFA executive committee members had requested bribes from the English team in exchange for their support. The parliamentary inquiry also received evidence that two other executive committee members were reportedly bribed with $1.5 million by the Qatar team. The Sunday Times was the source of those Qatar allegations, and its whistleblower, Phaedra Al Majid, retracted her claims in July 2011.

  Garcia's investigation had real authority behind it. Officials who refused his interviews faced disciplinary action. He could demand access to football figures worldwide. There were limits, though. Mohammed bin Hammam, the former FIFA vice-president who had been banned for life from football, could not be compelled to speak with Garcia. Russia presented a particular obstacle: Garcia was sanctioned from entering the country, so his deputy, Cornel Borbely, produced that section of the report instead. The section on the United States bid was also handled by Borbely, to avoid any conflict of interest given Garcia's American citizenship. Russia was the only bidding nation Garcia did not travel to in person.

  Garcia also had no power to subpoena witnesses or compel internet service providers to hand over documents. When The Daily Telegraph reported in December 2011 that the FBI was investigating alleged hacking into email accounts used by England and the United States in their bids, Garcia's investigation could not pursue that avenue through formal legal channels. FIFA itself prohibited bid teams from offering incentives to executive committee members or their relatives; the question was whether that prohibition had been observed.

• 4. A Report Locked Away

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  Garcia delivered his 350-page report in September 2014. Within days, Eckert announced that it would not be made public, citing legal reasons. Eckert said that at that point only four people had seen the document. He added that his own overview of Garcia's findings, conclusions, and recommendations would be published by mid-November 2014. Before releasing it, he offered a signal of what was coming: "Many won't like what I am going to tell them."

  Garcia had a different view of transparency. He called for the report to be published in full, with only the names of whistleblowers redacted. He described FIFA's ethics process with pointed language, writing that it "operates in most parts unseen and unheard. That's a kind of system which might be appropriate for an intelligence agency but not for an ethics compliance process in an international sports institution that serves the public and is the subject of intense public scrutiny."

  The standoff over publication attracted significant attention inside football. Several FIFA Executive Committee members, including Jim Boyce, Jeffrey Webb and Sunil Gulati, joined calls for the full report to be released. Jerome Champagne, a FIFA presidential candidate, and Richard Scudamore, chief executive of the English Premier League, added their voices. On the 15th of November 2014, Reinhard Rauball, the German Football League president, warned that UEFA might quit FIFA entirely if the report was not published in full, saying that if the crisis was not resolved credibly, "you have to entertain the question of whether you are still in good hands with FIFA."

• 5. The Whitewash Controversy

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  On the 13th of November 2014, Eckert released his 42-page summary. It cleared both Russia and Qatar of any wrongdoing. Russia's summary noted that the computers leased to the Russian bid team had been destroyed and that several email accounts could not be accessed, leaving "only a limited amount of documents available for review." Despite those gaps, the hosting rights were confirmed.

  The summary was not without criticism of other nations. England was described as having behaved improperly in its attempts to win the support of then-CONCACAF head Jack Warner. Australia faced scrutiny over the links between its bid and its funding of football development in African countries; two Australia consultants were found to have "violated the bidding and ethics rules." The bids from Japan and South Korea were also cited, with Japan's team criticized for distributing "gifts" and South Korea's for giving the appearance of "a conflict or an offer of benefits."

  FIFA welcomed "the fact that a degree of closure has been reached." The Associated Press reported that critics had "denounced" the summary as "a whitewash." Hours after the summary appeared, Garcia himself issued a public statement calling it "materially incomplete" and containing "erroneous representations of the facts and conclusions." He announced his intention to appeal to FIFA's Appeal Committee. Eckert, for his part, said he was surprised by Garcia's response and declined to release the full report. Within days Eckert was quoted saying the investigation was only at "an interim stage" and that Garcia "can now continue investigating towards the final report."

  On the 18th of November 2014, FIFA lodged a criminal complaint with the Swiss judiciary regarding "possible misconduct of individual persons in connection with the awarding of the hosting rights of the 2018 and 2022 World Cup," specifically concerning international asset transfers connected to Switzerland.

• 6. Garcia's Resignation

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  On the 16th of December 2014, FIFA's Appeal Committee dismissed Garcia's appeal against the Eckert summary as "not admissible." FIFA also stated that Eckert's summary was "neither legally binding nor appealable." The day after that ruling, Garcia resigned.

  His resignation letter cited a "lack of leadership" at FIFA and stated that he had lost confidence in the independence of Eckert from the organization. In June 2015, Swiss authorities characterized the Garcia report as being of "little value" to their investigations. Walter De Gregorio, speaking at a FIFA press conference on the 27th of May 2015, confirmed that the report had been in the hands of the Swiss Attorney General's Office since the 19th of November 2014.

  On the 19th of November 2014, before Garcia's resignation, FIFA's executive committee had unanimously agreed to publish a "legally appropriate version" of the report with redactions to protect witness confidentiality. That publication was conditioned on the conclusion of five ongoing ethics investigations into Angel Maria Villar, Michel D'Hooghe, Worawi Makudi, Franz Beckenbauer, and Harold Mayne-Nicholls. The executive committee also reaffirmed that it would not revisit the votes for the 2018 and 2022 tournaments. Two independent legal experts consulted by Domenico Scala, head of FIFA's audit and compliance committee, had supported that position. One day after the newspaper Bild announced that it had obtained a copy of the full report and planned to publish it, FIFA released the document itself on the 27th of June 2017, nearly three years after Garcia first delivered it.