Fink: Blatter under the spotlight

By Jesse Fink

Sepp Blatter is a master of survival. If he wasn't the president of FIFA he could have his own cable-TV adventure show like Bear Grylls, where he's dropped into the Yucatan rainforest to live off tree grubs and the occasional cooked lizard.

Whatever the environment, whatever the crisis, he seems to emerge even stronger than ever and we collectively wonder just how he does it.

But right now, in the midst of trying to recast himself as a reformer rather than the root of the world game's problems, he's bitten off more than he can chew.

There has been speculation this week that Blatter plans to release documents that show football officials of the highest echelon took kickbacks from the defunct Swiss company International Sport and Leisure (ISL) in exchange for the granting of World Cup marketing rights in the 1990s.

The officials allegedly involved are former FIFA president and now honorary life president Joao Havelange and executive committee members Ricardo Teixeira, Issa Hayatou and Nicolas Leoz.

Blatter has been resisting releasing the documents for a long time; and for good reason. He's complicit in what happened despite being cleared by a Zurich court of any wrongdoing in 2002 for his role in ISL's rise and its subsequent collapse.

The question that needs to be asked of him now is what he knew when it was going on and why, according to British investigative journalist Andrew Jennings whose heroic work into uncovering the facts of ISL's implosion has now forced FIFA's hand, he protected those officials whose palms were being greased.

As Jennings wrote in the opening of his sensational 2006 book Foul, FIFA mistakenly received a payment in 1997 from ISL for $1 million. It was supposed to go to Havelange directly and Blatter ordered that it be paid into Havelange's account.

Jennings made the claim in a subsequent BBC Panorama investigation that "Mr Havelange got a US$1 million-dollar bung in 1997. Sepp Blatter knew about it. He did nothing."

Now FIFA's new brigade of PR flacks might like to pass off the release of the documents now as a sign of the world body's commitment to transparency, but in my view, if the allegation is true, Blatter's previous failure to disclose Havelange's payment when he was FIFA's general secretary is about as untransparent as you can get and worthy of the utmost censure.

It makes his position untenable, whatever claim he has to transparency laughable and he should resign. The fact any money Havelange received from ISL was paid back is irrelevant.

If FIFA now wants to institute a "fit and proper person" test for its executive committee, it can't have also have a president who allegedly committed such a moral atrocity.

It effectively renders whatever FIFA says or does this week meaningless.