(ATR) FIFA has banned disgraced former vice president Jack Warner for life from football-related activities - four years after he quit the world football body with the "presumption of innocence."
Announcing the ban on Tuesday, Hans-Joachim Eckert, chair of the adjudicatory chamber of FIFA’s ethics commission, said the decision was taken on the basis of investigations into the scandal-riddled 2018/2022 FIFA World Cup bidding process.FIFA’s chief investigator Cornel Borbély opened a probe into Warner’s activities in January 2015.
"Mr. Warner was found to have committed many and various acts of misconduct continuously and repeatedly during his time as an official in different high-ranking and influential positions at FIFA and CONCACAF," FIFA’s ethics committee said in a statement.
"He was a key player in schemes involving the offer, acceptance, and receipt of undisclosed and illegal payments, as well as other money-making schemes," it added.
He was found guilty of offering and accepting gifts and other benefits as well as five other ethics violations.
The ban is effective from Sept. 25 when Warner was notified.
Warner currently faces extradition to the U.S. on corruption charges relating to his nearly three decades at FIFA. He denies wrongdoing and is resisting extradition on charges of racketeering, wire fraud and money laundering in the developing FIFA corruption scandal. The former CONCACAF president is one of the nine FIFA officials and five sports marketing executives who were indicted by US prosecutors in May.
One of the allegations leveled at the 72-year-old is that he took a $10 million bribe from South African football officials in exchange for votes to land World Cup hosting rights.
Warner quit FIFA in June 2011 following an ethics report that said there was "convincing and overwhelming" evidence that the former FIFA presidential candidate Mohamed Bin Hammam and Warner were involved in trying to bribe Caribbean Football Union members.
Bin Hammam attempted to buy their votes in his bid to oust Sepp Blatter as FIFA president in May that year. Warner helped facilitate the bribery and was described in the ethics committee dossier as "an accessory to corruption".The FIFA dossier included witness statements from a number of CFU members at the May 2011 meeting, offering "credible and correspondent" testimony that they were given envelopes containing $40,000.
FIFA's ethics committee said at Warner's hearing that he had "failed to provide the FIFA ethics committee with a plausible explanation".
Warner’s resignation signalled the end of FIFA's investigation into him, with the ethics committee closing procedures against the Trinidadian saying "the presumption of innocence is maintained".
FIFA's ethics committee is currently considering whether to ban Blatter and Michel Platini amid allegations of "financial mismanagement or misappropriation" levelled against the 79-year-old including a"disloyal" $2 millionpayment he is said to have made to the UEFA president.
Written by Mark Bisson
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