The theory I have heard is that some people in high places were furious with the loss to Qatar and called for increasing DoJ scrutiny of FIFA.
The American FBI and IRS joint investigation has been ongoing since 2009, over a year before Qatar was awarded the World Cup in
December, 2010, and the focus was initially on the 2016 Copa América Centenario being held in the US, not the 2022 World Cup in Qatar. The FBI and IRS were inspired to begin investigating thanks to the reporting and books of an old school British journalist named Andrew Jennings, who was willing to be a thorn in FIFA's side when few others would:
“Foul!” earned Jennings a following, including admirers within law enforcement. In 2009, he got a call from an “ex-spook” who wanted to introduce Jennings to a few people.
“I go down to London to this anonymous office block, and you go in and there are three men with American accents,” Jennings remembers. “They’ve got government-style haircuts. They introduce themselves as FBI special agents and give me their business cards, which say ‘organized crime squad.'”
“Bliss,” Jennings remembered thinking. “The European police forces will do nothing [about FIFA] so it was damn good to see professional investigators get involved.”
Jennings was eager to help, and after making a few phone calls to sources in the Americas, he sent confidential Confederation of North, Central America and Caribbean Association Football (CONCACAF) financial reports to the FBI and the IRS. They showed mysterious, multimillion-dollar “commissions,” Jennings claimed.
“I said, ‘Right, let’s just level the playing field a bit,'” he said. “And I gave them the documents that really got this going.”
Jennings trusted the FBI, rather than his fellow reporters, “to look at an organization like FIFA and know what crooks they are,” he said. For six years, he has used his sources to stay abreast of the investigation. Jennings said he knew that a grand jury had met in the past year to consider bringing charges but didn’t know who would be charged or when.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...d-the-fifa-scandal-that-toppled-sepp-blatter/
People are assuming that since the really big arrests in Switzerland and indictments in the US just came down in the past couple weeks that this is strictly a recent investigation that started with a worldwide scope, but it actually started focusing on American FIFA officials and corporations (like Nike) years ago. There had already been a quietly handled turning of American CONCACAF official Chuck Blazer in 2011, who plead to lesser charges in his 2013 trial (avoiding a 20-year prison term for racketeering) in exchange for sitting in on various FIFA meetings wearing a recording device in a key ring (it's all very cloak and dagger).
From 2010, UK investigative journalist Andrew Jennings has repeatedly alleged corruption in FIFA, from the broadcasting of a BBC documentary episode of Panorama, "FIFA's Dirty Secrets," on 29 November 2010.
The 2015 arrests center on the alleged use of bribery, fraud and money laundering to corrupt the issuing of media and marketing rights for FIFA games in the Americas, estimated at $150 million, including at least $110 million in bribes related to the Copa América Centenario to be hosted in 2016 in the United States. In addition, the indictment handed down by the U.S. District Court in Brooklyn, New York, alleges that bribery was used in an attempt to influence clothing sponsorship contracts, the selection process for the 2010 FIFA World Cup host, and the 2011 FIFA presidential election. Specifically, an unnamed sports equipment company – identified in multiple sources as Nike, Inc. – is alleged to have paid at least $40 million in bribes to become the sole provider of uniforms, footwear, accessories, and equipment to the Brazil national team.
In November 2013, American soccer executive and CONCACAF official Chuck Blazer pleaded guilty to 10 criminal charges including wire fraud conspiracy, money laundering, and offenses involving income tax and banking. Blazer's guilty plea had aimed to stave off a more serious charge of racketeering, which carried a potential 20-year prison sentence. Blazer would later make secret recordings of meetings with FIFA officials, and allegedly carried a recording device concealed in a key ring during the 2012 Summer Olympics in London.
Blazer had originally been approached by agents from IRS-CI and the FBI who in 2011 had begun investigating his involvement in alleged bribery during the bidding process for host countries for the FIFA World Cups from the early 1990s onwards. (The United States is one of two countries that broadly exercises worldwide jurisdiction to tax the net income of its citizens from any source in the world, and also requires taxpayers to report and pay tax on illegal income.) The information against Blazer (the charging document used in lieu of an indictment for a plea bargain) was revealed on May 27, 2015, the same day that the arrests were made in Zurich.
In May 2011, The Sunday Times published claims from a whistle-blower that President of CAF Issa Hayatou had, along with fellow Executive Committee member Jacques Anouma, accepted $1.5 million bribes from Qatar to secure his support for their bid for the 2022 FIFA World Cup.
In 2013, former FIFA President João Havelange and the Brazilian Football Confederation President Ricardo Teixeira were both found to have taken bribes worth millions of dollars. FIFA executive committee member Manilal Fernando (de) was sanctioned with a lifetime ban for bribery and corruption.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_FIFA_corruption_case
What i find strange though is that it took an american police organization to finally take some effective steps against an organization that's not of huge interest to americans in general.
While it's taken on a worldwide scope in recent days, the investigation mostly started out focused on crimes committed in the US or under North American FIFA jurisdiction, and then expanded from there as people took deals to spy on other FIFA officials in exchange for lesser charges, or one investigation started a domino effect that led to others being opened because there was no end to the corruption that was uncovered.
- Three of the indicted officials are American or hold dual citizenship (Blazer, Davidson, and Daryll Warner, one of two of Jack Warner's sons who have already plead guilty).
- One of the indicted corporations (Traffic Sports USA) that plead guilty is American.
- Some of the other corporations investigated for giving bribes for clothing contracts have been American (like $40 million from Nike to become the sole provider of clothing for the Brazilian National Team).
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CONCACAF is headquartered in Miami, Florida, so it's under US jurisdiction.
- $110 million of the bribes were for the 2016 Copa América Centenario in the US.
- Some unique properties of
US tax law on illegal income (which is how they got Al Capone) and the fact that the US is one of only two countries that exercises jurisdiction to tax the net income of its citizens from any source in the world makes it easier for us to prosecute this case.
- Likewise with some of the unique properties of the
RICO Act.
