Fifa crisis: Serious Fraud Office looking into 'possible money laundering'

Criminal proceedings could finally be launched over the Fifa scandal in the UK after the head of the Serious Fraud Office revealed that it was examining potential “money-laun­dering” by senior officials.

David Green, the SFO director, confirmed that his organisation had obtained some “new information” about allegations of corruption at football’s world governing body.

Green told a Culture, Media and Sport select committee hearing that the SFO had yet to launch a formal investigation into Fifa due to insufficient evidence that any offences took place on UK soil.

However, he said: “We are still examining issues around possible money-laundering, and I won’t be able to go into detail as new information has come to us quite recently.”

He suggested that some of that information related to a payment of 500,000 Australian dollars (£236,000) to disgraced former Fifa vice-president Jack Warner by Australia’s bid team for the 2022 World Cup finals.

“We have looked at it but, at the moment, I can’t confirm whether that went through London,” he said, admitting that it could be deemed “money-laundering” if it was paid via the capital.

“There are a number of matters that we are still looking at and digging into.”

Green defended the SFO’s failure to launch formal proceedings in the wake of the United States Department of Justice and Attorney General of Switzerland criminal action that sent Fifa into meltdown.

“Nothing has emerged so far that provides a UK jurisdictional nexus and would justify an SFA investigation.”

Green claimed that the SFO had no power to act over an allegation by Lord Triesman, the former chairman of the Football Association and England’s 2018 World Cup bid team, that Warner asked him for £2.5 million.

“It was rotten conduct and if we could, we would like to investigate it,” he said.

Green revealed that the SFO still had a team of five going through more than 1,600 documents provided by the FA relating to England’s doomed 2018 World Cup bid.

He revealed that attempts to secure a copy of the report into the award of the next two tournaments by US attorney Michael Garcia had proved fruitless, as had a request to the FBI for a copy of a statement from the whistle-blower, Chuck Blazer, that he was wired up during meetings with officials during the London Olympics.

Green said that the OAG was ­willing to help only if he requested what is known as mutual legal ­assistance, something he insisted he could only do if he opened an investigation, which the law prevented him from doing in the absence of sufficient evidence of wrongdoing on UK soil.

This circular argument irritated some of the MPs on the committee, with the Conservative Damian Collins, a founding member of the campaign group NewFifaNow, accusing the SFO of “standing on the sidelines in one of the biggest fraudulent stories the world has ever seen”.

Green, who took over as director in 2012, replied: “No one would be more pleased to open investigations into Fifa than I if I could.”

Britain was dragged into another scandal to have engulfed the most powerful men in football when allegations emerged Scottish-born former executive Charles Dempsey was paid $250,000 (£163,350) on the eve of the vote that took the 2006 World Cup to Germany.

Theo Zwanziger, the former head of the German FA, claimed a Swiss court document bears out his belief the late Dempsey, of New Zealand, was paid off a day before abstaining from a ballot Germany won 12-11 against South Africa after England were eliminated.

The court document was from the trial of executives from Fifa’s former marketing partners ISL. It was published in 2012 and Zwanziger made public his own copy from that year where he wrote ‘Dempsey!’ next to a payment to an anonymous recipient referred to as E16 – made on July 5, 2000.

Zwanziger’s claims were the latest allegations in a scandal which has rocked German football.

Franz Beckenbauer, the former World Cup bid leader, had been forced to deny allegations by Der Spiegel that a payment of €6.7million (£4.83  million) to Fifa in 2005 was connected to a slush fund used to secure the tournament. He and German FA president Wolfgang Niersbach, who is accused of knowing about the fund and the payments, say the money was paid to secure further Fifa funding.

But Zwanziger said in a statement through his lawyer on Tuesday: “It was not a solo thing by Franz Beckenbauer, the top officials of the organising committee were aware of it, Wolfgang Niersbach, Horst R Schmidt and Fedor Radmann.”

Meanwhile, the battle for the Fifa presidency descended into farce on Tuesday night after it emerged that duplicate nominations had been submitted that could rule at least one candidate out of the race.

Telegraph Sport has learnt that regulations permitting national federations to nominate only one contender to succeed Sepp Blatter were broken ahead of the deadline on Monday night for bids to be formally lodged. It was unclear on Tuesday which candidates had been affected by the error but the eight-man field was in danger of being reduced on Wednesday before the four-month election campaign begins in earnest.

The nomination of any federation which backed more than one candidate is automatically rendered void, meaning a contender with fewer than five unique nominations would not be allowed to stand.

Uefa was confident on Tuesday night that nominations for general secretary Gianni Infantino had not been requisitioned from associations which had also endorsed banned president Michel Platini.