The Legitimacy of Russia's World Cup Still Under Criminal Investigation
Many FIFA watchers, and some from the beaten England bid, struggled to believe it was a result achieved by fair means.
That is despite a FIFA ethics committee investigation into all nine candidates from the 2018-2022 hosting contests which cleared the Russian bid, albeit with limited evidence-gathering powers and no access to the famously destroyed campaign computers.
What sustains doubts is that investigations by federal prosecutors in the United States, Switzerland and France, and FIFA's ethics court, suggest some of the 22 men who voted never picked a World Cup host on soccer merits alone.
One likely Russia voter was Chuck Blazer, the late American whose tax affairs, confession of taking South African money in the 2010 World Cup vote, and cooperation with the FBI fueled much of a devastating investigation of corruption linked to FIFA officials.
In his travel blog days before the vote, Blazer detailed an August 2010 visit to the Kremlin where he high-fived Putin during "a half hour exchange of wit, charm and effective communications."
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