The Asian Football Confederation "has announced plans to create its own Ethics Committee that it expects will be operational by January," according to Paul Nicholson of INSIDE WORLD FOOTBALL. An initiative of new AFC President Sheikh Salman bin Ebrahim Al Khalifa, he said he hoped that the committee "will help fight AFC corruption at all levels." The new AFC Ethics Committee "will be set up as a mirror of the FIFA ethics structure" with two-chambers -- one investigative and one judiciary. The AFC exec committee, meeting in Manama, Bahrain, also "agreed to adopt a stronger ethics code on a par with the FIFA Ethics Code." One of the biggest challenges for Asia "is to effectively combat the match-fixing, much of which has its source in south-east Asian gambling rings." At press time, "there were no details on how far the new AFC Ethics committee would go into the investigation of match-fixing or how the new structures would work with FIFA's own Ethics structures or whether they could both end up investigating the same complaints" (INSIDE WORLD FOOTBALL, 7/23).
