GENEVA — A leading FIFA anti-corruption adviser resigned Monday, claiming football's governing body failed to change its culture after bribery and vote-buying scandals. Alexandra Wrage, the president of international compliance expert TRACE, left an advisory panel chaired by Swiss law professor Mark Pieth which was asked to guide FIFA President Sepp Blatter's promised modernizing reforms. “(FIFA) remains the closed society that fueled its problems to begin with,” the United States-based not-for-profit group said in a statement. Wrage leaves Pieth's team after it pledged to increase its FIFA work when it met in Switzerland last week for a final scheduled session to decide strategy ahead of a FIFA congress on May 31 in Mauritius. Pieth, who has had increasingly testy relations with Blatter and his organization, said they will monitor FIFA beyond the congress. “(The panel) discussed all options and unanimously arrived at the conclusion that FIFA continues to need a compliance watchdog after the Congress of 2013 for the remaining reform steps, amendments, and especially for the implementation of the reform program,” Pieth said in an email statement to The Associated Press. Blatter has suggested Pieth's mandate should end at the congress. “Since this means an intensive workload for the (panel) for the year 2013-14, Ms. Wrage has decided to leave the group,” wrote Pieth, a former United Nations investigator. Warner and Blazer face likely legal cases Former FIFA officials Jack Warner and Chuck Blazer face possible legal action from soccer's ruling body and probes from the FBI and Internal Revenue Service after a report found they had committed serious acts of fraud. CONCACAF, which governs the sport in North and Central America and the Caribbean, made public Friday an Integrity Committee report which highlighted the misuse of millions of dollars from the late 1990s. On Sunday, Warner, the former CONCACAF president, resigned from his post as minister of national security in the government of Trinidad & Tobago. He followed that up Monday by resigning as chairman of the United National Congress party. The Integrity Committee has been asked to come up with recommendations on what steps CONCACAF should now take, while the confederation is also taking legal advice. The report detailed Warner's private ownership of what CONCACAF believed was its own $25-million Centre of Excellence in his native Trinidad. — Agencies
