Lord Triesman details Fifa corruption allegations

Lord Triesman, the former chairman of the FA who led England's doomed 2018 World Cup bid, has accused four senior Fifa officials of demanding money and favours, including a knighthood, in return for their support.

The latest allegations of corruption at Fifa came when he addressed MPs at a Commons sub-committee. He said that the requests were made early on in the bidding process and that he did not report them as he felt doing so might undermine the English bid.

Triesman was forced to resign from the 2018 bid team in May last year after a newspaper sting. When the vote took place in Zurich six months later the FA was humiliated, coming last with just two votes.

Triesman now says that Jack Warner, a Fifa vice-president, had asked for £2.5m for an educational project in his homeland of Trinidad and Tobago. He asked for the money to be paid directly through him and also requested £500,000 to buy Haiti's TV rights to the World Cup.

Triesman also alleged that Brazil's Fifa member Ricardo Terra Teixeira told him "come and tell me what you have got for me," while Paraguay's Fifa representative, Nicolas Leoz, went one further and asked for a knighthood.

A fourth official, Worawi Makudi of Thailand, asked for the TV rights to a friendly match to be organised between England and the Thai national team.

Triesman said: "These were some of the things that were put to me personally, sometimes in the presence of others, which in my view did not represent proper and ethical behaviour on the part of members of the executive committee." He said he did not take the matters further as he feared doing so would have "burned off our chances".

MPs at the culture, media and sport committee in the House of Commons also heard evidence submitted by the Sunday Times that two other Fifa executive committee members were paid $1.5m to vote for Qatar's controversial and successful 2022 World Cup bid.

The paper claims that Fifa vice-president Issa Hayatou from Cameroon and Jacques Anouma from the Ivory Coast were paid $1.5m by Qatar. Tory MP Damian Collins said the submissions from the Sunday Times would be published as part of the committee's investigation into the unsuccessful bid for the 2018 World Cup.

Warner is head of the influential Concacaf group of American nations at Fifa, which was tipped to vote for England but did not eventually back the bid. He dismissed the accusations today as "nonsense" and "foolishness".

At the time of the vote in December last year it was claimed that accusations of corruption against Fifa officials in the British media had turned many delegates against the 2018 bid. Before the poll, Fifa's ethics committee was forced to ban two executive committee members after a Sunday Times investigation into World Cup bidding. ·