PORT OF SPAIN, Trinidad, October 18 – Former FIFA vice-president Jack Warner promised damaging revelations about FIFA President Sepp Blatter’s electioneering, in a letter to a local newspaper.
Warner, Trinidad and Tobago’s Minister of Works, quit his post on the FIFA Executive Committee and as head of the Americas football confederation CONCACAF June 10 amid a bribery scandal ahead of the FIFA presidential election and the expulsion of another FIFA vice president, Mohamed Bin Hammam.
Warner alleged, however, in a letter to the Trinidad Guardian, that Blatter used him and Bin Hammam to offer similar “gifts” while running for the post in 1998 and 2002.
“We took (Blatter) on a worldwide crusade begging for support for him and he won,” Warner wrote.
“That was the first time I met the present deputy chairman of FIFA Ethics Committee, Petrus Damaseb, at the time the president of the Namibia Football Association.
“I will tell the world what gift Bin Hammam gave to him then, which was not a bribe then as he has ruled today.”
Warner blamed FIFA for “leaking” a video that was taken during Bin Hammam’s controversial visit to meet Caribbean Football Union (CFU) officials.
In the video, posted last week by British newspaper The Daily Telegraph on its website, Warner can be heard telling CFU delegates he had not been in favor of Bin Hammam offering money at the meeting.
“I said to him, ‘If you bring cash, I don’t want you to give cash to anybody but when you do you can give it to the CFU and the CFU will give it to his members,” Warner said, according to the report.
“‘I don’t want (it) to even remotely appear that anyone has any obligation to vote for you because of what gifts you have given them’, and he fully accepted that”, Warner added.
Trinidad and Tobago Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar responded on Thursday by instructing Attorney General Anand Ramlogan to examine the video and “advise whether there is anything to be concerned about.”
Warner previously threatened to rock FIFA with a “tsunami”, when he was suspended in May, and produced an e-mail from FIFA General Secretary Jerome Valcke that accused Qatar of “buying” the 2022 World Cup and mocked Bin Hammam’s presidential campaign.
