Suspicious US$10-million South African payment keeps spotlight on Fifa
Football’s world governing body faced fresh pressure on Saturday, after media reports that the highest levels of South Africa’s government approved a US$10-million payment US investigators suspect was a bribe to get the 2010 World Cup.
Then-president Thabo Mbeki and foreign minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma approved the payment, the reports said, which the authorities again insisted was for a legitimate development project in the Caribbean.
The new revelations came as Fifa remained in the eye of a corruption storm that has seen seven executives arrested, its president Sepp Blatter announce his resignation and former executive committee member Chuck Blazer admit to paying bribes.
England’s Football Association chairman Greg Dyke predicted the scandal engulfing Fifa will see the arrest of 79-year-old Blatter, who has pledged to begin reforming the body before standing aside after a new election sometime between December and March 2016.
The one thing you discover if you run an organisation is that the moment you say you’re going, you’ve gone. He’s dead. It’s over
Blatter, once considered the most powerful man in sport, will not attend an International Olympic Committee meeting in Lausanne next week.
“The one thing you discover if you run an organisation is that the moment you say you’re going, you’ve gone. He’s dead. It’s over,” Dyke told British newspaper The Guardian.