<\/p>\n
Embattled FIFA president Gianni Infantino has been accused of a potential abuse of power and conflict of interest after the Norwegian Football Federation (NFF) filed formal complaints to two FIFA committees.<\/p>\n
They revolve around three matters: Infantino\u2019s aborted plan to open up the World Cup to private investors, the lifting of the suspension of US star Folarin Balogun at the 2026 World Cup following an intervention by Donald Trump, and FIFA\u2019s awarding of a so-called Peace Prize to the US president.<\/p>\n
The first filing made on Tuesday \u201casks the Ethics Committee to examine the conduct of FIFA President Gianni Infantino and any other individuals identified through the investigation for potential breaches of FIFA\u2019s Code of Ethics\u201d.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The second filing is aimed at FIFA\u2019s Governance, Audit and Compliance Committee (GACC) and \u201casks whether FIFA\u2019s governance, financial oversight, internal controls and decision-making processes (have) worked as intended\u201d.<\/p>\n
Lise Klaveness, the NFF\u2019s straight-talking president and longtime critic of Infantino, told The Times newspaper that Trump was the common thread in all three issues.<\/p>\n
Trump\u2019s son-in-law Jared Kushner\u2019s brother Josh\u2019s venture capital firm was to be the chief investor in the ill-fated FIFA Forward Enterprise (FFE) plan.<\/p>\n
Infantino\u2019s plan, launched just after this year\u2019s hugely successful World Cup co-hosted by Canada, Mexico and the United States in July would have allowed private investors to acquire stakes in a company created under the FFE initiative.<\/p>\n
The backlash that followed led to Infantino making a humiliating climbdown within days.<\/p>\n
\u201cFIFA Forward Enterprise is a governance issue but it\u2019s connected to the two other cases because (of) conflict of interest and abuse of position, potentially,\u201d Klaveness told The Times.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere is a line between all these three cases and it\u2019s the same political regime.\u201d<\/p>\n
Klaveness, a former international footballer, said Infantino had some serious questions to answer over a lack of transparency.<\/p>\n
Balogun\u2019s red card in the last-32 win over Bosnia and Herzegovina during the World Cup resulted in an automatic suspension for the match with Belgium.<\/p>\n
But FIFA stepped in and suspended his ban, leading to widespread condemnation, especially when it emerged that Trump had intervened by phoning Infantino.<\/p>\n
The FIFA Peace Prize award that Infantino presented to Trump in December has been widely ridiculed.<\/p>\n
\u201cThese are three very different factual cases, but they all have something in common that we want examined,\u201d said Klaveness.<\/p>\n
\u201cIs it an abuse of power, an abuse of position? Is it a breach of political neutrality?<\/p>\n
\u201cIs it in accordance with the rules of governance, as the FIFA Council should be the strategic body, and the president shouldn\u2019t really have any unilateral power?\u201d<\/p>\n
Klaveness, 45, had in August called upon Infantino to resign and forego his bid to be elected to a fourth and final term as president.<\/p>\n
The 56-year-old Swiss has insisted he will seek re-election in Rabat next March and as yet no other candidate has declared.<\/p>\n
Infantino, who was first elected in 2016, must secure a majority of the 211 votes from the organisation\u2019s members in order to be re-elected.<\/p>\n
The deadline to declare to run is November 18.<\/p>\n
Klaveness has said she will not be a candidate \u2014 despite some observers, including Infantino\u2019s predecessor Sepp Blatter, believing she would be a good fit as FIFA chief.<\/p>\n
Aleksander Ceferin, president of European football\u2019s governing body UEFA, has said he is not interested.<\/p>\n
UEFA have been unsparing in their verbal assaults on Infantino and FIFA, dismissing the FFE plan as \u201ca shady and opaque backroom deal\u201d.<\/p>\n
The likeliest rival is thought to be Canadian Victor Montagliani, president of CONCACAF, whose body along with UEFA and the Asian Football Confederation (AFC) have formed an anti-Infantino alliance.<\/p>\n
However, while a swathe of UEFA\u2019s members have publicly withdrawn their support for the 56-year-old Swiss, some of the AFC\u2019s associations, such as 2034 World Cup hosts Saudi Arabia and 2022 hosts Qatar, have pledged their loyalty to him.<\/p>\n
African football\u2019s governing body CAF and South America\u2019s CONMEBOL are also supportive.<\/p>\n
UEFA has also gone to a court in Florida in an attempt to access documents related to Infantino\u2019s failed plan with the aim of gathering evidence for a potential criminal complaint in Switzerland, where UEFA and FIFA are based.<\/p>\n
The latter responded by accusing UEFA of a \u201cmisinformation campaign\u201d and saying it was attempting to \u201cinfluence\u201d the election.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
Rephrase in a different way as if you were a native American speaker as a content creation expert and do not talk about yourself or your experience in the text and do not show yourself as an artificial intelligence who wrote and fill the bullet point in the topic and speak the heart of the topic itself and dont take date of blog in ther first and dont take text like box of newsliter subscribe on post from content and romove all linke insert in content and and remove all affiliate disclosure phrases on content like this “This post may contain Amazon or other affiliate links that allow us to earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. Please see our Disclosure Policy for more info” and “#” put in its place bullet point, and romove name of the web site or his links we are take a content from our new creation, and don’t publish clone new content more than just one time<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Embattled FIFA president Gianni Infantino has been accused of a potential abuse of power and conflict of interest after the Norwegian Football Federation (NFF) filed formal complaints to two FIFA committees. They revolve around three matters: Infantino\u2019s aborted plan to open up the World Cup to private investors, the lifting of the suspension of US […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":15795,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rank_math_lock_modified_date":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[940,3092,1411,8764,3096,3097,1182,439,234,3095,1724,930,8535,3093,7713,3088,3094,3098],"class_list":["post-16915","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-american","tag-characters","tag-chief","tag-complaint","tag-content","tag-creation","tag-dont","tag-double","tag-experience","tag-expert","tag-fifa","tag-hit","tag-infantino","tag-native","tag-norwegian","tag-rephrase","tag-speaker","tag-talk"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alfanouscar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16915","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alfanouscar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alfanouscar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alfanouscar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alfanouscar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16915"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/alfanouscar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16915\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16916,"href":"https:\/\/alfanouscar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16915\/revisions\/16916"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alfanouscar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15795"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alfanouscar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16915"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alfanouscar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16915"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alfanouscar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16915"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}