EU lawmakers want FIFA to check Infantino over Trump peace award

Fifty members of the European Parliament are asking FIFA’s ethics committee to look into their president Gianni Infantino. They are upset about him giving a ‘peace prize’ to the US President Donald Trump.

The MEPs signed a letter that supports a complaint from FairSquare, a sports human rights group based in the UK. This letter was sent in December.

The letter is dated June 29 and was made public on Thursday night by FairSquare. It states that FIFA’s ethics code says Infantino must “remain politically neutral”.

The letter shows that the 50 MEPs from 13 European countries agree with FairSquare. It included the NGO’s request for FIFA’s ethics committee to find out if the decisions to create an annual FIFA peace prize and award it to President Trump were made by the FIFA Council, the bureau of the council, or just by Infantino himself.

The MEPs wrote: “This complaint represents an opportunity for FIFA to prove its commitment to political neutrality, transparency, and accountability.”

Among FIFA’s 211 member nations, only Norway has joined the criticism of the ‘peace prize’. The Norwegian football federation wrote a letter calling for an investigation in June.

FairSquare said in a press release that this letter is “the most significant intervention by European policymakers into misgovernance and rule breaking at the top of the world game since the European Parliament called on Infantino’s predecessor Sepp Blatter to resign in 2015”.

Blatter announced his resignation in June 2015, shortly after he was re-elected president. The 50 MEPs are mostly Social Democrats, Liberals, and Greens. The four main signatories were Barry Andrews from Ireland, Lara Wolters from the Netherlands, Dane Niels Fuglsang, and Sebastian Everding from Germany.

The letter also pointed out FIFA’s connections with Saudi Arabia, which will host the 2034 World Cup. It mentioned FIFA’s recent sponsorship deal with Saudi Arabia’s national oil and gas company, Aramco, which the MEPs called “the world’s biggest corporate polluter.”