Norway’s football federation has launched a FIFA governance challenge, formally filing complaints with two FIFA committees over three controversial issues involving the organisation’s leadership and decision-making processes.
A statement of the Norwegian Football Association (NFF) seen by Reuters revealed that it took parallel applications to both the FIFA Ethics Committee and the FIFA Governance, Audit and Compliance Committee (GACC). The transfer marks the NFF’s most serious formal protest against FIFA President Gianni Infantino and probes further into the NFF’s long-standing worries about transparency and institutional accountability.
The complaint submitted to the Ethics Committee also calls on investigators to look at the actions of Infantino and anyone else they can identify from the investigation that may have violated FIFA’s Code of Ethics. In isolation, the NFF wanted the GACC to review whether the financial controls, internal governance, and decision-making processes within FIFA have been conducted appropriately.
The reasons for the filings have been three different issues that have caused controversy in international football. They encompass the FIFA Peace Prize, the lifting of the suspension that United States striker Folarin Balogun faced in the World Cup and the scrapped FIFA Forward Enterprise (FFE) project.
The idea behind the FFE project was to enable investors to hold minority shares in a corporation that would have run FIFA events, including the World Cup.
The NFF said their latest move followed a series of questions raised over FIFA’s governance, transparency and separation of powers over the past several years. The federation wants the appropriate bodies to look into the issues, gather relevant evidence and take accountability as per their findings.
FIFA stated Infantino had already responded to the concerns raised by member associations in a letter he sent in September, which included his willingness to have an independent examination of the decision-making system of the governing body.
