A former executive member of FIFA, Dr. Amos Adamu, has lost his appeal against a three-year ban from football at the Court of Arbitration for Sport sitting in Lausanne Switzerland.
The court yesterday upheld the judgement of the world football governing body’s Ethics Committee banning him from football-related activities until October 2013.
Adamu, a former director-general of the National Sports Commission (NSC), was found guilty of seeking bribes for votes during bidding for the 2018 and 2022 World Cups.
After reviewing the verdict, the panel, apparently sensing the uproar generated by the scandal, later stated that the ban “was relatively mild given the seriousness of the offence.”
Reviewing the verdict culled from the website of Times of India, a local tabloid based in New Delhi, the Indian capital, the CAS panel stressed that it was of crucial importance that top football officials should not only be honest but evidently and undoubtedly be seen to be honest.”
The court rejected Adamu's argument that the evidence was inadmissible because it might have been illegally obtained, maintaining that rather, “There has been no ordinary judge declaring that the evidence was unlawfully obtained and prohibiting its use, and that it was even not sure that the Sunday Times journalists acted illegally.”
He was secretly filmed by British undercover reporters from The Sunday Times newspaper asking for $800,000 ((euro) 600,000) to influence his World Cup vote, saying the money would pay for artificial turfs to be built in some unspecified places in Nigeria.
In the end, the scandal implicated Adamu and five other senior officials, plunging FIFA into turmoil weeks before the December 2010 votes.
Adamu was not only stripped of his votes during the balloting, he also lost his seat as Africa’s representative on the FIFA Executive Committee and was ordered to pay FIFA a fine of 10,000 Swiss francs ($11,100; (euro) 8,300).