Blatter orders inquiry into alleged voting scam

The FIFA president agreed to examine claims, first made in the London Daily Mail almost a year ago, that Haiti's vote at the FIFA Congresses of 1996 in Zurich and Paris in 1998 was "stolen" by unauthorised stand-ins from other countries. 

"I am going to mandate the Disciplinary Committee to examine the claims," Blatter told reporters on a short visit to London. "Perhaps we should have opened an investigation on these matters before -- but it is not too late to do so now. The investigation will be conducted through the Disciplinary Committee and I will ask the secretary of the committee to tackle this case." 

A FIFA spokesman confirmed on Wednesday that the matter was being passed to the committee in time for their next scheduled meeting at the end of March.

Blatter also said that Horace Burrell, the president of the Jamaican Football Association who sits on the Disciplinary Committee and who is alleged by the Mail to have played a role in the voting irregularities, would not be involved in judging the case.

Video evidence
The decision by Blatter to initiate the investigation is a triumph for the Mail newspaper which alleged, with video evidence and internal FIFA documents, that a female associate of Burrell from Jamaica voted in place of Dr Jean-Marie Kyss, the absent delegate from Haiti, who was refused permission to leave his country, in 1996. 

The only vote taken at the 1996 Congress was on whether to expand FIFA's Executive Committee from 21 to 24 members and Congress overwhelmingly agreed to do so by 130-41 votes. Dr Kyss, the former president of the Haitian FA, was also absent from the FIFA Congress in Paris in 1998 when Blatter was elected FIFA president with a 111-80 vote victory over his only rival, UEFA president Lennart Johansson of Sweden. 

FIFA's records indicate that Haiti's vote in the election was cast by Neville Ferguson, a citizen of Trinidad and Tobago and personal assistant to FIFA vice-president Jack Warner, the president of FIFA's CONCACAF confederation. 

Blatter denied any involvement in the alleged voting irregularities when he spoke to journalists in London, adding: "I was not involved in this matter but have been aware of the publicity about it. Perhaps mistakes have been made in the past and action needs to be taken."