(MENAFN- Arab Times) FIFA has banned the official it chose to inspect 2018 and 2022 World Cup hosting candidates for breaking ethics rules. Harold Mayne-Nicholls was suspended for seven years by FIFA's ethics committee which gave no reason in its decision published on Monday.
The former Chile football federation president has previously spoken to some media of conversations he had in 2010 with officials in Qatar about possible work placements for relatives at the Aspire youth academy.
Mayne-Nicholls was considering standing in the FIFA presidential election when his ethics case was reported last year.
Instead, he is barred "from taking part in any kind of football-related activity at national and international level for a period of seven years," the ethics panel said in a brief statement.
FIFA ethics judge Joachim Eckert chaired the panel which conducted a personal hearing for Mayne-Nicholls, who can appeal to FIFA and then the Court of Arbitration for Sport.
Eckert's statement said "more detailed information will be given after this final decision becomes effective."
Challenges to FIFA's appeals committee and subsequently to CAS typically take around one year.
Mayne-Nicholls was appointed by FIFA in 2010 to lead a six-member team evaluating the 2018-2022 World Cup bidders. All nine candidates were visited between July and September 2010.
In the technical report, Mayne-Nicholls flagged eventual winners Russia and Qatar as presenting the most risk to FIFA as potential host nations.
The FIFA executive committee largely ignored his report, and a FIFA-commissioned analysis of the commercial prospects for each bidder's World Cup project, in a December 2010 vote.
Mayne-Nicholls was voted out of office in Chile soon after completing his task for FIFA.
Plunged into crisis by a second FIFA bribery scandal in four years, the CONCACAF soccer body wants to pass sweeping new leadership rules to help rebuild.
The North and Central American and Caribbean governing body published anti-corruption proposals Monday after its past two presidents and general secretaries were implicated in an American federal investigation of racketeering in international soccer.
CONCACAF's president since 2012, Jeffrey Webb of the Cayman Islands, and an executive committee colleague Eduardo Li of Costa Rica are fighting extradition to the United States from prison cells in Zurich where they were arrested in May.
Its top administrator, Enrique Sanz, is suspended from all soccer duty by FIFA and CONCACAF after being linked to arranging bribes for Webb from the rights-holding sports marketing agency where he used to work.
"From a crisis standpoint, this is a pretty big crisis," CONCACAF legal adviser Sam Gandhi told The Associated Press. "We have to solve our own problems and we need to show we are a leader."
The reform proposals include: Imposing term limits on CONCACAF presidents and executive committee members; appointing independent outsiders to the policy-making executive panel executive committee; publishing salaries and expenses of top officials.
"The whole world has acknowledged that independent board members are important to avoid conflicts of interest," Gandhi said of an idea FIFA refused to enact in its own reform process two years ago.
CONCACAF also wants to run background checks on potential commercial partners, hire a compliance officer and run a whistleblower hotline.
The detailed plans for "systemic organizational change" were published Monday, one day before CONCACAF's Gold Cup tournament kicks off in the United States.
"We are going to be able to put on a great event and going to be able to pay prize money," Gandhi, a partner with law firm Sidley Austin, said in a telephone interview. "We have had no restrictions on our operations."
Still, CONCACAF's marquee competition was named in a stunning 164-page indictment published in May by the US Department of Justice. It alleged widespread corruption over 24 years in the award of broadcast rights for international soccer events.
Gold Cup rights through 2021 are held by the Traffic Sports USA Inc agency, whose president Aaron Davidson is one of 14 soccer and marketing officials named in the indictment. The company has made a guilty plea to wire fraud conspiracy.
Webb and Li are also among those 14 indicted in the widening American federal investigation, as was former CONCACAF president Jack Warner, a longtime FIFA vice president, who is resisting extradition from his native Trinidad and Tobago. Two of Warner's sons already made guilty pleas.
Warner's former right-hand man at CONCACAF, American Chuck Blazer also had his guilty plea unsealed in May.
Between them, they ran CONCACAF for more than two decades until Blazer turned whistleblower in 2011 to implicate Warner and then-FIFA presidential candidate Mohamed bin Hammam of Qatar in a vote-buying plot.
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