Pressure is mounting on Fifa to rerun the bidding process for the 2022 World Cup in the wake of bribery claims against the hosts Qatar.
Britain's former attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, a member of an independent governance committee set up by Fifa in the wake of previous corruption scandals, said that if allegations can be proved the decision to award Qatar the right to host the 2022 tournament cannot stand.
Meanwhile, Australia and Japan, whose bids to host the tournament were rejected in favour of Qatar, have joined calls for Fifa to rerun the bidding process for 2022.
The Sunday Times obtained millions of documents that it said showed that Mohamed bin Hammam, a Qatari former Fifa executive committee member, paid £3m in cash and gifts to senior football officials to help secure Qatar's bid.
The evidence has been passed to Fifa's ethics prosecutor, Michael Garcia, a former US attorney in New York, who is due to meet Qatari bid officials in Oman on Monday as part of his investigation into the bidding process. There have been reports that Garcia had no plans to interview Hamman.
Goldsmith said the revelations should be thoroughly investigated. "After the revelations in the Sunday Times, if he [Garcia] wasn't intending to see Bin Hammam he plainly has to now," he told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.
Goldsmith added: "If Fifa is to emerge from the scandals, and this isn't the only one – there are other issues – it has to produce a convincing and transparent answer to these allegations, particularly to these hosting decisions.
"If these allegations are shown to be true, then the hosting decision for Qatar has to be rerun … if it is proved that the decision to give Qatar the World Cup was procured by bribery and improper influence then that decision ought not to stand."
Speaking of his committee's finding, Goldsmith said: "What we identified as one of the issues that it needed to look at was the hosting decision in Qatar. We had seen what they [Fifa] had done in relation to it. We didn't think it was satisfactory. And that's why we insisted they look into this and Michael Garcia, former US attorney for southern district of New York, was appointed to be that investigator and that's what he's doing now."
Yuichiro Nakajima, head of Japan's unsuccessful bid to host the 2022 World Cup, said the allegations should be investigated by Garcia and backed calls for the bid process to be rerun. Speaking to Today, he called for wider reforms. "All of this points to the need for a major reform at how Fifa is governed," Nakajima said.
The Australian football association has said it is "heavily involved" in investigating claims of corruption in Qatar's successful World Cup bid.
The chief executive of Football Federation Australia, David Gallop, told local media it had been involved in interviews and the production of documents.
"We need to get more information about what's been revealed in the last 48 hours," Gallop told SEN radio in Melbourne.
"But don't be under any illusion that we haven't been heavily involved in all of this for some time now. "We've been involved in interviews, production of documents and also following carefully what's been happening away from Australia – so we've got people that have been involved for some time now."
The Qatar 2022 bid committee said it had always upheld the highest standard of ethics and integrity in its successful bid to host the World Cup. It said: "In regard to the latest allegations from The Sunday Times, we say again that Mohamed bin Hammam played no official or unofficial role in Qatar's 2022 bid committee. As was the case with every other member of Fifa's executive committee, our bid team had to convince Mr bin Hammam of the merits of our bid."
It said it was cooperating fully with Garcia's investigation.
Greg Dyke, the chairman of the Football Association, said Fifa should not blame the messenger by rounding on the British press as it has in the past. He described the evidence presented by the Sunday Times as "pretty damning".
He told the Today programme: "A lot of people in Fifa think the British media … is somehow out to get them, whereas actually I thought this was a remarkable piece of investigative journalism."
He added: "It clearly has to be investigated as a matter of urgency by Fifa. If it is shown that the process was corrupt, or corrupted, then I do think there will have to be a discussion about whether you take it away from Qatar.
"It was always seen as a strange decision to give the World Cup to a country where it is so hot in the summer you can't possibly play it. The advice from Fifa's own safety group was there are real safety problems, and yet that was ignored by the people who were voting."
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