KEIR RADNEDGE REPORTS: Nigerian Amos Adamu is back in trouble with the FIFA ethics committee, just over three years after completing his original suspension from all football activities.

German judge Hans-Joachim Eckert has opened adjudicatory proceedings after ethics prosecutors requested a two-year ban for unspecified charges including conflict of interest.

Adamu was a member of the FIFA executive committee member in 2010 but was suspended by the ethics committee shortly before the controversial vote in the December which awarded 2018 and 2022 World Cup host rights to Russia and Qatar respectively.

He was barred from voting for asking undercover reporters posing as bidders for $800,000 in a sting by The Sunday Times.

Later Adamu was banned for three years and had to relinquish his positions both within the leadership of FIFA and the Confederation of African Football after failing in two appeals against his sanction.

‘Mild’ sanction

When the Court of Arbitration for Sport rejected his second appeal in 2012 the panel said it considered the three-year ban as being “relatively mild given the seriousness of the offence.”

FIFA’s then ethics prosecutor Michael Garcia was also reported at the time to have been studying reports that Adamu’s son, Samson, had tried in vain to negotiate a $1m sponsorship by the Qatar’s World Cup bid committee to host a gala dinner in South Africa on the eve of the 2010 World Cup.

A statement from the ethics chamber on the latest case said that “for reasons linked to privacy rights and the presumption of innocence until proven guilty, the adjudicatory chamber will not publish further details at the present time.”

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