adminPORT OF SPAIN – Fallen Fifa executive Jack Warner said US authorities would be unable to give him a fair trial, while an Argentinian businessman indicted in the soccer body’s sprawling corruption scandal handed himself over to Italian police.
Warner, a former schoolteacher and Trinidadian ex-minister of national security at the heart of the criminal case engulfing football’s world body, is the subject of a US request to have him extradited from Trinidad.
The 72-year-old said the United States is not the “appropriate jurisdiction” to handle the matter “fairly” and claimed America is trying to exact revenge because it tried but failed to lobby Fifa to host the 2022 World Cup.
“One must be extremely careful to question whether the United States can be fair in taking action against officials of an international body whom it feels have done it wrong,” Warner wrote in an editorial in the weekly Sunshine newspaper, which he owns.
Warner called the United States two-faced, since he and Blatter had once been welcomed to the White House by President Barack Obama.
“Was the president of the US seeking a strong lobby from a Fifa vice president or was he ‘bribing’ a Fifa official with a visit and a meal to the White House? I think not,” Warner said.
“In each case, the answer is no, but it just goes to show how selective this ‘bribe’ issue can be,” he added. – BBC
Online Reporter