MOSCOW: Russian President Vladimir Putin will hold a ‘football summit’ with FIFA supremo Gianni Infantino in Sochi next Monday as the doping scandal shows no sign of going away writes KEIR RADNEDGE.

On the day that Deputy Prime Minister Vitaly Mutko confirmed the presidents’ meeting the former Sports Minister also confirmed that a Russian international player was under investigation over doping allegations.

Mutko, formerly a member of the governing FIFA Council and local World Cup organising committee, told news agency TASS: “They will meet on February 12. As I understand it, there will be two visits by Infantino this month as well as closer to the start of the World Cup.”

Concern about how far the Russian doping scandal had infected the nation’s football has been expressed ever since Canadian law professor Richard McLaren revealed the findings of his investigation for the World Anti-Doping Agency two years ago.

Mutko told TASS he had been notified that FIFA was investigating Rubin Kazan defender Ruslan Kambolov in a case “not linked to the national team.”

Kambolov has played twice for Russia, once in 2015 and once in a June 2017 friendly against Chile.

Mutko said a further FIFA investigation was under way into Ivan Knyazev, a former defender with the under-21s.

The Sports Ministry is suing companies building World Cup stadiums for $50.8m over delays in constructions schedules.

Russia is spending $13.2bn on the tournament, more than half of which will come from the federal budget and the wants to recover $17.8m from the construction firm of Gennady Timchenko, which is building stadia in Nizhny Novgorod and Volgograd.

The remainder is being claimed from contractors building stadiums in Saransk, Samara, Yekaterinburg, Kaliningrad and Rostov-on-Don.

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