FIFA suspends two senior officials

FIFA on Wednesday provisionally suspended two members of their executive committee from Nigeria and Oceania who are at the centre of an alleged World Cup 2018 vote selling scandal, an official said.

“We had to take a decision to suspend two members of the FIFA executive committee… They are Amos Adamu and Reynald Temarii,” Claudio Sulser, president of FIFA’s ethics committee, told journalists.

“The provisional decision is against these two members,” he added after a meeting of senior FIFA officials, underlining that the committee would judge on the fundamentals of the case over the next month.

FIFA had summoned the two to a meeting of the ethics committee in Zurich, which is investigating allegations of votes being sold in World Cup bidding for 2018.

A British newspaper reported on Sunday that Adamu and Temarii, who are members of FIFA’s decision-making executive committee, had offered to sell their votes in the bidding race for the 2018 World Cup to undercover journalists posing as lobbyists.

Sulser said the decision was made after viewing full length video tapes provided by the newspaper, and hearing the two officials, to ensure respect for football, pending an in-depth investigation and ruling on the case in November.

“The committee has zero tolerance as far as violations of the code of ethics are concerned,” he explained.