Berlin: German prosecutors said they were looking into claims that Germany bribed football officials to win the right to host 2006 World Cup. “This could be about corruption, fraud or breach of trust,” Frankfurt chief prosecutor Nadja Niesen said. “We will examine the available documents. But we are still at the very beginning and have not yet launched an investigation. This could happen if we can confirm there is initial cause for suspicion.”
Germany won the right to host the 2006 World Cup by beating South Africa with 12 votes to 11 after New Zealand’s Charles Dempsey abstained in the final ballot. On Friday, Der Spiegel weekly published a report claiming that the German Football Association (DFB) had a slush fund to buy votes. The magazine claims the DFB borrowed 10.3 million Swiss francs from the now-deceased CEO of German sportswear giant Adidas, Robert Louis-Dreyfus, in order to buy the votes of four Asian members of FIFA’s 24-strong executive committee. Spiegel claimed the DFB then transferred 6.7 million euros — the equivalent of the borrowed Swiss francs at the time — to a FIFA account in 2005 to repay Louis-Dreyfus.
