Prince Ali seeks FIFA vote suspension

FIFA presidential contender Prince Ali bin al Hussein has called on the international sport tribunal to suspend Friday's world football election over the voting arrangements.

The Jordanian prince, one of five hopefuls, wants transparent voting booths used at the congress to find a replacement for Sepp Blatter. This has been rejected by FIFA's election commission.

The scandal-tainted FIFA faces mounting pressure over arrangements for the vote in which Asian and European contenders Sheikh Salman bin Ebrahim Al-Khalifa and Gianni Infantino are the favourites.

Jerome Champagne, a former FIFA official from France, has demanded that the world body cancel accreditations for the Asian Football Confederation and UEFA saying they will be used to lobby for Sheikh Salman and Infantino.

Prince Ali's Paris lawyers said they had gone to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) to get the vote suspended because FIFA would not agree to an emergency hearing on the voting booths.

"We have registered a new demand at the CAS asking for the suspension of the election scheduled for Friday February 26," Szpiner, Toby, Ayela and Semerdjian said in a statement.
The lawyers had made a request for a CAS hearing about the booths. But they said FIFA's electoral chiefs had blocked any CAS hearing before Friday's vote.

"FIFA opposed our request for an accelerated procedure (at the CAS) so that these questions could be decided before February 26," the lawyers said.

"It was therefore natural that Prince Ali goes to the CAS."

The statement said the suspension request to CAS was made Monday. The tribunal made no immediate comment.

The prince has paid for transparent voting booths to be sent to Zurich for the congress.
."Only a transparent booth can prove that each voter is following his heart and conscience and that there are no forced votes, by preventing voters taking photos of their voting paper to prove that they have followed voting instructions," Renaud Semerdjian, one of the lawyers, told AFP.

FIFA responded by saying that mobile phones and cameras would be banned in the voting booths so that no photos could be taken.

With the election campaign reaching a tense peak, the prince and Champagne have led complaints about the arrangements. The fifth contender is Tokyo Sexwale, a South African tycoon and politician.

Champagne called on FIFA to cancel the accreditation of UEFA and AFC observers and indicated he could also go to CAS.

Champagne accused Sheikh Salman, the AFC president, and Infantino, UEFA general secretary, of seeking to "swamp" Friday's vote with supporters.
Champagne said the observers would give an unfair advantage to Sheikh Salman and Infantino.

The former FIFA deputy secretary general said he had discovered with "stupefaction" that AFC and UEFA observers had been accredited "at the very moment when these two confederations are in their final push in favour of their respective candidates."

He added that those accredited were mainly members of Sheikh Salman and Infantino's campaign teams.

"It is clear that this reveals the objective to swamp the Congress hall with confederation employees able to access the voting FAs and their delegates," he said in an official complaint to FIFA's electoral committee.

He called on the committee to cancel "these unfair and undue privileges" and warned of other action if there was no response by Tuesday.

FIFA's 209 member associations are to vote for a new leader as the world body seeks to recover from multiple scandals that has seen 39 football officials and business executives charged with corruption by US authorities. Two companies also face charges.

Swiss prosecutors are investigating FIFA's management and the attribution of the 2018 and 2022 World Cups to Russia and Qatar.

Blatter and UEFA president Michel Platini were suspended for eight years by FIFA over a two million dollar payment that Blatter approved for the French football legend.
Source :AFP