{"id":12311,"date":"2011-07-22T06:34:00","date_gmt":"2011-07-22T13:34:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/2011\/07\/22\/bin-hammam-faces-life-ban-over-bribe-claim\/"},"modified":"2011-07-22T06:34:00","modified_gmt":"2011-07-22T13:34:00","slug":"bin-hammam-faces-life-ban-over-bribe-claim","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/2011\/07\/22\/bin-hammam-faces-life-ban-over-bribe-claim\/","title":{"rendered":"Bin Hammam faces life ban over bribe claim"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Hammam02\"SKY – ZURICH, Mohamed bin Hammam is facing a potential life ban from football when he goes before Fifa’s ethics committee later on Friday.<\/strong> <\/p>\n

The 62-year-old senior Fifa member – suspended since May 29 – denies attempting to bribe officials of the Caribbean Football Union (CFU) to vote for him in last month’s presidential election.<\/p>\n

The Asian Football Confederation president and his lawyers are determined to give “convincing grounds” of his innocence.<\/p>\n

Leaked details suggest “compelling circumstantial evidence” has been compiled for the ethics team against Mr bin Hammam.<\/p>\n

But the Qatari argues that he is the victim of “clear attempts to besmirch my name in the public domain”.<\/p>\n

“There can be no doubt that there has been a campaign waged within certain quarters to ensure that I am seen to be guilty and eliminated from football in the court of public opinion, even before my hearing has started,” said Mr bin Hammam.<\/p>\n

“The leaking of confidential information by individuals to the media, before the entire story had been told in a manner that is fair to all sides, was done for their own purposes and personal agendas.”<\/p>\n

The evidence collected relates to a meeting specially-convened by Mr bin Hammam and the former Fifa vice-president Jack Warner on May 10 in Trinidad in the run-up to the presidential election.<\/p>\n

The central accusation is that Mr bin Hammam left gifts of $40,000 (\u00a324,000) for CFU member associations in exchange for their votes.<\/p>\n

However, it is understood there is no direct evidence linking Mr bin Hammam to the money.<\/p>\n

It has been reported that he has refused to release bank details to investigators, except for one that shows he wired $363,557.98 on April 28.<\/p>\n

He says the money was to pay the hotel and travel expenses of the delegates who were attending the meeting in Port of Spain, Trinidad.<\/p>\n

Fifa has swept aside allegations of corruption levelled at the organisation by the former 2018 England bid team chairman Lord Triesman.<\/p>\n

And that has been followed by a whistleblower now saying that she lied to The Sunday Times when she said two Fifa members had taken money to vote for the successful Qatar 2022 World Cup bid.<\/p>\n

Fifa, which in the end controversially re-elected its president Sepp Blatter unopposed, still has much to do to improve its image as football’s world governing body.<\/p>\n

A ban for Mr bin Hammam would be sure to raise further questions about the process by which Qatar won the right to stage the 2022 World Cup.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

SKY – ZURICH, Mohamed bin Hammam is facing a potential life ban from football when…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22614,"featured_media":11179,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[90],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12311","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-c17-asian-competitions"],"views":3408,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12311","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/22614"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12311"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12311\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11179"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12311"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12311"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12311"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}