Chuck Blazer gets provisional ban

[Califax]

May 6, 2013

By Associated Press

ZURICH -- FIFA provisionally banned outgoing executive committee member Chuck Blazer of the United States from all football-related activities for 90 days on Monday after he was accused of embezzling at least $21 million last month.

Blazer had previously said he'll be giving up his seat on FIFA's ruling board when his term expires this month, and was accused of having enriched himself through fraud in a report released in April by CONCACAF, the governing body for North and Central American and Caribbean football. Blazer is a former secretary general of CONCACAF and was accused of embezzling at least $21 million by compensating himself with the body's funds without any authorization. Blazer, the most senior American official at FIFA for 16 years, also allegedly bought some apartments with CONCACAF money. He resigned as CONCACAF's secretary general in December 2011.

FIFA said in a statement Monday that its ethics committee decided to provisionally ban Blazer "based on the fact that various breaches of the FIFA Code of Ethics appear to have been committed by" the American.

Blazer has not commented on the ethics allegations.

The American was the whistle-blower in a bribery scandal involving his former boss at CONCACAF, Jack Warner, who resigned as the body's president in June 2011 after Blazer accused him and then-Asian confederation head Mohamed bin Hammam of attempting to bribe Caribbean delegates $40,000 each to vote for bin Hammam in the FIFA presidential election.

[Grizzly]

I have posted a lot in the past about how corrupt Blazer was and how he was as much to blame as Warner. However, while they deserve whatever punishment they get, they were just the middle men. And as convenient as it is to blame small Caribbean and central American countries for the corruption of CONCACAF, without the USSF being the ringleader of this corruption it would never work. Blazer was just doing the bidding of the USSF and now they will hang him out to dry as the fall guy and continue business as usual with someone else in charge. And as long as FIFA is corrupt to the core nothing will ever change, just corrupt officials purging other corrupt officials when they outlive their usefulness or fall afoul of party doctrine.