Watchdog or fig leaf - how ethical is the IOC and FIFA? (News Feature)

By Guenter Deister Dec 1, 2010, 13:12 GMT

Hamburg/Zurich - The international reputations of the high-ranking officials cannot be denied.

Javier Perez de Cuellar of Peru is a former United Nations secretary-general.

Thomas Buergenthal, born to German-Jewish parents, who survived Auschwitz, is a prominent US judge and law professor.

Guy Canivet is a member of the Constitutional Council in France.

Samuel Schmid was a federal president of Switzerland.

And Guenter Hirsch was the president of the Federal Court of Justice of Germany for eight years between 2000 and January 2008.

They all have one thing in common: they sit on either the ethics commission of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) or the ethics committee of football's world governing body FIFA.

The IOC and FIFA, both based in Switzerland, are exempt from Swiss anti-corruption law which treats them as non-profit sporting entities.

And that although the Olympic body turns over some 6 billion dollars every four years and the football federation, thanks to the World Cup, around 4 billion dollars.

The granting of these priceless events is not seen as a commercial act in legal terms, but comes under legislation relating to club activity. Misdemeanours within both these two sports organisations are dealt with by a sort of self-justice, exercised via its two ethics watchdogs.

The IOC set up its ethics commission directly after the 1999 corruption scandal surrounding Winter Olympics candidate Salt Lake City, which cost 10 IOC members their positions. Its nine commission members include such high-ranking officials as Perez de Cuellar, Buergenthal, Carnivet and Schmid.

The Olympic body calls the commission 'independent' because only a maximum of four members can also be IOC members. Unlike FIFA's ethics committee, the IOC's guardians of its ethical principals take no decisions themselves, but make recommendations to the IOC executive board and Session.

However, even such a prominently-appointed ethics commission cannot protect the IOC from the suspicion that the institution is being used as a fig leaf.

Only recently the executive committee restored its suspended South Korean member Lee Kun Hee with full rights after the multi-billionaire, who had been convicted on charges including tax evasion, received a presidential pardon to enable the tycoon to help promote Pyeongchang's efforts to host the 2018 winter Olympics.

The decision has left the IOC open to the suspicion it does not want to lose one of its valuable sponsors. Lee is chairman and chief executive of Samsung Electronics which pays the IOC a four-yearly sum of some 100 million dollars.

Nevertheless the IOC cuts a better figure than FIFA.

The world governing body under its president Joseph Blatter established its 'independent legal organ' in 2006 and lost its first chairman after a year when Lord Sebastian Coe, the former British Olympic champion, stepped down to work on England's World Cup bid.

The 14-member committee is a colourful mixture of judges, former players, club presidents and general secretaries in which Germany's former federal justice court president Hirsch appears almost exotic.

The chairman is Blatter's compatriot Claudio Sulser, a lawyer from Lugano who played 49 times for the Swiss national team.

When earlier this month the ethics committee handed only short suspensions to two FIFA executive committee members over the scandal of alleged payments for World Cup votes, there was worldwide indignation. Hirsch let it be known he had nothing to do with the case, but has decided in the meantime against making any comments.

But there are also systematic differences between the two sporting bodies. The IOC's more than 100 members get to decide on the Olympic hosts, and since 1999 are not allowed to visit host city candidates.

At FIFA, there are a maximum of 24 votes from the executive committee members. That means fewer people are exercising power, with corresponding feelings of personal enhancement and pressure as factors coming into play. In addition, for the 2018 and 2022 tournaments seven of the executive committee officials are from countries making bids. In the IOC they would have no voting rights.

Selecting two tournaments at once is also an invitation for bartering in all its forms. The executive committee members have been guests at all nine candidate countries. In Moscow, inclusive a visit to the Kremlin, and in Washington to the White House.

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