According to whose law should this be illegal? I imagine a US or EU domiciled official might infract on his home statutes, but a Waziristan official? Maybe bribes are prized there?
Do such supranational organizations have enforceable bylaws? Also, other felonies, say embezzlement, what country is able to charge, judge and/or arrest the perpetrator?
Confused…
The DOJ indictments allege that officials conspired in the US and used American banks in their schemes. That’s enough to assert extraterritorial jurisdiction, at least to the satisfaction of the Swiss authorities.
In the case of the current FIFA investigation it’s because meetings took place in New York or the people involved transferred money through US bank accounts. FIFA also does substantial business in the US, the US broadcast rights for the world cup are worth 100’s of millions of dollars.
If the bribery had taken place outside the US, money never touched the US and FIFA did not do any business in the US then they would have no jurisdiction.
Well, they might. I don’t know about the details of US law in this regard, but it’s entirely possible that it criminalises corruption, wherever perpetrated, with respect to people or events in the US. We know the facts on which jurisdiction is said to rest in the current instance, but we don’t know that jurisdiction couldn’t rest on different facts, so long as there is some link to the US.
Jurisdiction can be surprisingly broad sometimes. The Alien Tort Claims Act allows people from other countries to bring private suits in US courts against other foreign individuals for human rights violations committed in other countries.
Also, some countries, particularly in Europe, assert universal jurisdiction over certain crimes.
No comment about the jurisdiction issue but I’m also kind of puzzled by why the popular media refers to FIFA’s problems as “corruption”. To me, isn’t FIFA just a collection of private citizens who have gathered together to organize what are essentially games for children? They aren’t policemen or civil servants or supreme court justices, what on earth could they be “corrupt” about?
For example a lot of people seem to be upset about how FIFA plans to have the world cup in Qatar/Russia, insinuating that this was because the Qataris/Russians paid off FIFA officials to do that. Why is that a bad thing? I thought these people were professional sporting event promoters, isn’t getting paid as much as possible to organize sporting events literally their job?
I understand that the above is not actually what they are being prosecuted for, and that what they actually being prosecuted for are real crimes, or at least, I could imagine a scenario where they might be real crimes, not knowing any more details about the facts, but the public criticisms of FIFA on the internet have always sounded completely nonsensical. What’s next, should the FBI start raiding the offices of the WWE, because I have a hunch that their so called professional wrestling matches are actually fixed ahead of time! :eek:
Corruption is a pretty broad term, and it isn’t limited to corruption of public officials. The FIFA officials are accused of taking bribes from people to award FIFA’s games and its intellecutal property rights (like television broadcasting rights) to the bribers. That sounds like corruption to me.
Mark Joseph Stern explained that the FIFA officials are accused of being dishonest in dealing with FIFA. Thus, FIFA is the victim of its officials’ corrupt crimes. We can infer that if the officials had been honest, FIFA itself would have gotten better deals from the Qataris and Russians. Perhaps FIFA could have put on more children’s games in other places or better ones, or received more money for selling the television rights and been better off. FIFA bust legal strategy: The Department of Justice is using RICO to save soccer.. I’m relying on Stern’s legal analysis in this case and it is usually questionable, but his account is generally consistent with what I’m reading in other reputable sources.
Not directly on point to the current FIFA bribery scandal, but bribery related to sporting events is illegal in the US. There’s no need for anyone to be employed by the government.
There’s also the more general concept of commercial bribery, which I learned about in one of the many FIFA threads.
Exactly; they are essentially accused of stealing from the organization.
Well, it seems that the current issue of The Economist has no less than 4 stories on FIFA and related questions.
Bigger than Blatter
Taxi for Blatter!
Good money, bad money
The world’s lawyer
This size of coverage is quite unusual and offers a very detailed analysis of the whys, hows and the US role.
Bottom line - This is a huge business (~$5 billion). Most money comes from rich countries, primarily by FIFA having a monopoly on selling media ads for the huge events. FIFA has 209 member organizations, in the one country, one vote system. It is extremely easy to buy votes, by distributing that money to people like Waziristan’s soccer association - whereas most of it stays in the pocket of the official representing that association. Distributions are discretionary.
By the way, the RICO statutes are involved, since federal bribery laws cover only payments to government officials, so it says.
The issue is FIFA executives asking for payments to their own personal bank accounts in tax haven countries, rather than for payments to the FIFA organisation. Since FIFA is a non-profit organisation (yes really), soliciting payments to personal bank accounts is pretty clearly stealing from the organisation as well as bribery and corruption.
There’s nothing in the concept of “corruption” which limits it to government business.
Exactly, think of it this way. Lets say I’m the IT Manager for a large fortune 500 bank based in Hong Kong. I go to Huawei and say if you pay me $500,000 into a private cayman islands bank in return for changing all my networking routers over from cisco systems to Huawei routers.
That’s illegal because its stealing from the company, they get a worse product at a higher cost than if the competition was fair. And if the bank has branches in the US then potentially that person could be prosecuted under US law even if it wasn’t a crime in Hong Kong.
Waziristan has no soccer association, it would be represented by the Pakistan Football Federation, which is a bloody useless body and where cricket is the main sport anyway.
As for the OP. Yes, the rules for private businesses are different for government, but do note that FIFA, Pakistan Football Federation, or for that matter Boeing are legal entities in their own right. They are not private businesses owned by their officials. All officers, managers and employees of a entity owe a duty of care to act in the best interests of the organisation
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Think of it this way. You make a payoff to an organisation as a whole, then that might well be legal, indeed that is done all the time ("host the WC in my country and I’ll increase the monies we contribute to FIFA, reduce tax liability for your people there and provide free shopping tours to the wives of all officials as well as medical coverage to their kids) while giving payoff to an individual in his personal capacity most certainly is illegal (“here $ 1 million for your account, make sure the new Boeing plant is built in my district”). It is the later that is alleged to have happened here.
That’s illegal because its stealing from the company, they get a worse product at a higher cost than if the competition was fair. And if the bank has branches in the US then potentially that person could be prosecuted under US law even if it wasn’t a crime in Hong Kong
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While the media has concentrated heavily on the “US Banks” angle, almost all of the corrupt deals were actually brokered in the US. Simply using a US bank, or server is not going to practically get you on the hook.
Actually, all indications are that certain FIFA officials can in fact take bribes. 
Others have covered one important aspect of a response to you, namely that the amounts were paid to corrupt officials, not to the organisation.
There are other problems.
Firstly, FIFA is not a private for profit enterprise. It’s a not-for-profit sporting association which (I think it is safe to assume) would have as its constitutional goal the promotion of soccer (or something along those lines). The raising of maximum cash is not the goal.
Secondly, even if one were to argue that raising maximum cash is a worthy secondary priority in that it might fund the budget to enable the primary priority of promoting soccer, it’s unlikely that priority is achieved by taking cash donations from countries wishing to host the World Cup. The big money comes from TV rights, and I doubt that this is maximised by holding the World Cup in (for example) an isolated low population backwater like Qatar.
Thirdly even if none of this was a problem bear in mind that FIFA actively represents to bidder nations that it considers their bids to hold the World Cup on a relatively objective basis, depending on rational factors like the quality of stadiums etc. Even if it were otherwise all A-OK for FIFA to award the World Cup on the basis of which nation gives it (or its officials) the biggest secret backhander, it would be at least an egregious misrepresentation and at worst probably a fraud on the bidder nations not to admit this, bearing in mind that those nations spend millions on their bids.
Also, it’s not just a FBI case where the US wants people extradited, it’s also a Swiss investigation since FIFA is subject to Swiss laws.
Well, that proves that these FIFA guys are pretty stupid. everybody here knows that you never:
-pay bribes direct-you go through a 3rd party (a “bagman”)
-never use banks; pay bribes in cash (small denomination bills, well used currency
-never “write when you can speak, never speak when you can nod, never nod when you can blink”
These guys are amateurs when it comes to corruption.:smack: