Michael Garcia Now Just Taunting FIFA
And I say that in the most complimentary way. If you haven’t been following this story, here’s a quick recap: FIFA awarded the 2018 and 2022 World Cups to Russia and Qatar, respectively. This raised eyebrows, as they say. Didn’t we just endure a crazily expensive and possibly corrupt Winter Olympics in Sochi? And what is the average high temperature in a Qatar summer, when the World Cup is normally played? Oh, 106°?
Athletes will play soccer matches for up to 120 minutes in that? At some point people wondered if maybe these decisions weren’t made on the merits and instead owed something to corrupt payments made to FIFA officials. So FIFA hired Michael Garcia, a former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, to conduct an internal investigation and get to the bottom of the situation. Paragon of integrity! How could anyone doubt the results if Garcia gave FIFA a clean bill of health? So over 18 months, Garcia conducted that investigation. Earlier this year, he wrapped things up and delivered his report to FIFA executives. Apparently, his deal with the much-maligned soccer organization was that his report would be made public. It wasn’t.
So Garcia waited. And waited. He agitated for its release. And finally it (or the happy version of it) was released, with FIFA declaring itself corruption-free and the World Cup bidding process legitimate. Maybe it wasn’t a big deal that laptops Russia used during its bid were destroyed and not made available to investigators. Garcia wasn’t having it. He denounced FIFA’s secrecy after he’d completed his work. And last week he lodged an appeal of FIFA’s official report, publicly proclaiming it to be incomplete and inconsistent with what he learned over 18 months. And now that FIFA has concluded its own investigation, the FBI reportedly is ramping up its own. A primary feature of any legitimate internal investigation is the investigator’s independence from the subject. Garcia is exhibiting a fairly extreme version of that independence here.
It’s not often that a white shoe investigator makes an exit this noisy. As Tom Fox notes, “If your outside counsel disavows him or herself from the company’s interpretation of [an internal investigation], you are in big trouble." FIFA might have hoped that it would be able to contain the damage by hiring him to bless some version of the facts that was just vague enough for everyone to keep his job. Instead, an actual criminal investigation is on its way. In addition to being the right thing to do, Garcia is only helping his reputation as an independent investigator here. Corporations that want to learn own up to actual facts and move past a crisis can hire him without much concern that he’ll deliver a whitewash. Of course, it might not be much fun exposing the actual truth either. So, you know, pick your poison.
Update (Dec. 17, 2014): Garcia has resigned in protest over the handling of his investigation's findings. In doing so, Garcia wrote a letter revealing, among other things, that the FIFA executive committee led by President Sepp Blatter tried to have disciplinary proceedings opened against Garcia in September for "allegedly violating the Code of Ethics through [his] public comments." It's hard to believe but apparently true.