FIFA President Gianni Infantino "hired the Norwegian FA official Kjetil Siem as his new director of strategy to oversee reform -- two years after Siem hailed Sepp Blatter as 'a role model,'" according to the London GUARDIAN. FIFA said that Siem "had taken up a newly created position in its reformed structure, and would begin work before the arrival in June of the governing body’s recently appointed secretary general, Fatma Samoura, a UN official from Senegal who has never before worked in football." For the past four years, Siem, who had a spell running the Premier Soccer League in South Africa, "was secretary general of Norway’s FA." He is credited in Norway with creating the “Handshake for Peace” project with the Nobel Peace Centre, which was later adopted by Blatter. Speaking to Dagbladet in Jan. '14, Siem said, "I’m sure no Norwegian has more respect than I do for the FIFA President Sepp Blatter. He is actually a role model." Siem leaves Norway’s FA "after a difficult few months, having recently given in to pressure to make public what officials claimed in expenses" (GUARDIAN, 5/18).
THE WRONG MESSAGE: The PA reported anti-corruption experts have criticized Infantino "for weakening the independence of the governing body's compliance and ethics committees at a crucial time in its history." Infantino's first FIFA Congress as the man in charge "was tarnished" when Audit & Compliance Committee Chair Domenico Scala, a key figure in FIFA's attempts to recover from last year's scandals, "stormed out of the congress venue in Mexico City." Scala "was furious at a late change Infantino made to the rulebook which gives his inner circle, the FIFA Council, unprecedented control over the key committees to recruit and dismiss members." Transparency Int'l, the Berlin-based good-governance body that publishes the Global Corruption Barometer, "backed Scala's decision to draw attention to Infantino's move." A Transparency Int'l spokesperson said, "The fact the ethics committee and the audit and compliance committee were independently run was a step in the right direction. Taking this independence away, even for just a year, is significant primarily because of the way it was done and the message it sends" (PA, 5/17).
'VERY CONCERNED': BLOOMBERG's Tariq Panja wrote considering the allegations of rampant use of performance-enhancing drugs by Russian athletes, FIFA Medical Committee Chair Michel D’Hooghe said FIFA should be "very concerned" about doping controls at the 2018 World Cup in Russia. D’Hooghe said, "You have to look very carefully where will be the controls in the World Cup in Russia." A doctor by training, D’Hooghe "leads the group responsible for all medical aspects" of football. He said, "We should be very careful" (BLOOMBERG, 5/18).
