FIFA's probe into the controversial bidding race for the 2018 and 2022 World Cups was thrown into turmoil after its own investigator Michael Garcia complained that a summary of his report misrepresented his conclusions.
Garcia, who carried out an exhaustive investigation into the bidding, slammed an "incomplete and erroneous" version of his report and said he planned to appeal.
Football's world governing body had earlier cleared Qatar and Russia of corruption and ruled out a re-vote for the tournaments despite widespread allegations of wrongdoing.
Garcia, a former New York federal prosecutor, spent 18 months investigating the controversial World Cup race that ended with the selection of Russia for 2018 and Qatar for 2022.
Garcia's 350-page report, handed to FIFA on September 5, summed up an investigation that involved interviewing more than 75 witnesses and compiling a dossier with more than 200,000 pages and audio interviews.
But he issued a statement on Thursday saying: "Today's decision by the chairman of the adjudicatory chamber contains numerous materially incomplete and erroneous representations of the facts and conclusions detailed in the investigatory chamber's report. I intend to appeal this decision to the FIFA Appeal Committee."
Qatar and Russia no corruption. In other news ,moon made of cream cheese.
— Stan Collymore (@StanCollymore) November 13, 2014
German judge Hans-Joachim Eckert, chairman of the adjudicatory chamber of FIFA's independent ethics committee, had stated that the investigation had not yielded evidence of corruption and there would be no re-vote on awarding the tournaments.
The report admitted that even though there had been a series of worrying episodes in the bidding for both tournaments, there was not enough evidence to justify reopening the process.
"The report identified certain occurrences that were suited to impair the integrity of the 2018/2022 World Cups bidding process," said the 42-page report.
"The occurrences at issue were, in the chairman's assessment, only of very limited scope …. (and) far from reaching any threshold that would require returning to the bidding process, let alone reopening it.
"The assessment of the 2018/2022 FIFA World Cups bidding process is therefore closed for the FIFA ethics committee."
The report also said that Australia's bid contained "certain indications of potentially problematic conduct of specific individuals in the light of relevant FIFA Ethics rules."
Hassan al-Thawadi, secretary-general of the Qatar 2022 organising committee, told AFP: "We were confident that any impartial investigation was to show that our record was clean and contains no irregularities."
The report also found no evidence of misconduct related to the Russian bid for 2018, but added that not all records had been available to the investigation.
The computers used by the Russia Bid Committee had been leased and then returned to their owner and destroyed, meaning access to emails was not available.
Sports Minister Vitaly Mutko, a member of FIFA's powerful Executive Committee, told TASS news agency: "I was sure that this is what would happen – our bidding campaign was absolutely honest.
