Chuck Blazer, General Secretary of the Football Confederation and member of the FIFA Executive Committee, has sent a formal letter in response to the letter from David Will to the members of the FIFA Executive Committee regarding the FIFA Internal ad hoc Audit Committee.

The letter follows the approval of the FIFA Emergency Committee in suspending the work of the ad hoc audit committee following a request from FIFA President Joseph S. Blatter.

The text of the letter is as follows:

Dear Mr. Will:

I am considerably distressed in reading your letter of today’s date. You are well aware that there is considerable cause for putting into question the confidentiality of the Committee and its work up to now.

While things started out on the pretext of security and confidentiality, even by moving the initial meeting offsite to the Baur au Lac Hotel, to the inconvenience of the members due to consecutive rather than simultaneous translation being used, we spent that entire morning dealing with issues of procedure and confidentiality.

You asked for a special waiver for you to have a Secretary from the Scottish F.A. to take notes for you, to which the members agreed. However, following the meeting, those notes were being discussed by him and a representative of Dr. Chung, who had been left behind to collect information in his absence. I objected and said that it was neither the purpose for which you had been granted a secretary nor a proper disclosure, especially since Dr. Chung’s representative had not signed nor agreed to the confidentiality document agreed to by the other members; nor had Dr. Chung at that point signed it since he left before the second day of meetings when the confidentiality document was perfected.

Furthermore, Dr. Chung only attended the first hour of the afternoon session on the first day before departing Zurich to return home. In that session and in his presence, KPMG made a presentation which covered the topic of Securitization. Since then, we haven’t seen Dr. Chung, but nonetheless, you have continued to send him your notes and materials from the sessions. To this date, I do not know whether Dr. Chung or his representative ever signed the confidentiality letter. In any case, it was a requirement of the Executive Committee that confidentiality was part of the order forming the Ad hoc Internal Audit Committee.

Upon the opening of the last meeting in Zurich, on April 10th, I gave you a copy of a wire story from Australia where Dr. Chung was making political statements and quoting amounts of loans dealing with refunding accomplished by the Securitization. Furthermore, I saw him on CNN International that same day also making those statements. I lodged my objection with you at the meeting and you simply brushed it off saying that he might have had that information from other sources.

Mr. Chairman, your response was totally inadequate and was regrettably consistent with responses to other failures which I brought to your attention. I objected when, following a witness’ testimony, I returned to the meeting room and found you questioning him on matters which were not discussed during the general meeting. I objected to that procedure when the meeting began and asked how many other private meetings without other members of the Committee you had. You said the only other meetings were with the General Secretary, but claimed that the audit or matters relevant to it were not discussed. Now, given the declarations of the General Secretary about the Internal Audit, I am even finding that hard to believe.

In that same session, I made the point that Dr. Chung should not be allowed to return for only the final session of the meeting and be entitled to vote on matters of which he had been absent. Dr. Chung has only attended 1 hour of meetings in actual session and while he was designated by the group who submitted your name and Mr. Aloulou’s to the Executive Committee, he has not done justice to the process nor the Committee and the region that he represents. You said that would be taken into account, but personally, I believe now that the matter should be discussed at the Executive Committee meeting on May 3rd and a replacement should be found.

At the opening session I made the statement that this Committee was the formation of a political process, and therefore I would be scrupulous to see that the members who intended it for that purpose would not be allowed to abuse it. Dr. Chung, despite your disagreement, did say that he agreed that this has flowed from a political process. It is now time for the members of the Executive Committee to stand up and say that they will not allow the misuse and abuse of our processes for those ends, which seem to be more and more in style in recent days.

Mr. Chairman, I did copy President Blatter with the stories which contained information given to the Committee and was relieved to see that, while you were unwilling to take any action, he acted properly to preserve the integrity of FIFA and its Executive Committee. While you see no authority for his action, I for one, see that he is mandated to uphold the decisions of the Executive Committee, the first of which was the confidentiality that has been breached from the first day of meetings with your passage of materials and notes to Dr. Chung and, subsequently, by his abuse of the system by making these issues public.

Your approach of going off on your own at this time, either as Vice President of FIFA or a Member of the Executive Committee, is entirely out of order. The work of the Committee has been suspended pending the meeting of May 3rd. As a member of the Committee, I strenuously object to any independent investigation not being done in accordance with the full participation of the Committee. The only authorization for independent work was our authorization for you to review the Securitization contracts. If you are intent on destroying the work we have done so far, then this is probably the best way to throw the entire process into disrepute.

The Executive Committee should take note that this process has been taken seriously by some of its members, but not by all. It can only be beneficial if true common goals are shared by all.

Sincerely yours,

(signed) Chuck Blazer

For more details contact:

Football Confederation:
Rick Lawes – Director of Communications
Tel: +1 212 308 0044
Fax: +1 212 308 1851