UEFA secretary general Gianni Infantino speaks to journalists during the UEFA press conference in Prague yesterday. (AFP)

Reuters/Prague

UEFA has hit back at suggestions that it and other continental confederations have been responsible for blocking reforms aimed at cleaning up soccer’s scandal-plagued world governing body FIFA.
UEFA general secretary Gianni Infantino said there were enough mechanisms in place to ensure that only officials with a clean past were elected on to FIFA committees.
His comments came after Domenico Scala, who is overseeing FIFA reforms, demanded that an independent committee be created to carry out integrity checks on executive committee members before they could be allowed to take office.
Scala said confederations had blocked these reforms and said their “actions must be consistent with their speech.”
Continental confederations, which elect the FIFA executive committee members, currently carry out integrity checks, a system which Infantino said should continue.
“UEFA and the European associations have always been in favour of reforms and have always been in favour of integrity checks being made in the confederations,” he told reporters.
“Our members have to comply with our disciplinary and ethics rules at any time, not only when they are candidates. In addition to this, you have the FIFA ethics regulations which means FIFA can, at any time, make all the checks that they want to any person they want.
“I don’t think this is a real issue, it’s more a communication issue. The real instruments are there, they just have to be applied.”
FIFA was embroiled in scandal when a US probe led to the criminal indictment on May 27 of nine current and former FIFA officials and five executives in sports marketing and broadcasting on bribery, money-laundering and wire fraud charges. FIFA president Sepp Blatter said on June 2 he would step down and call a new presidential election in which he would not be a candidate.
This will take place between December and February with the exact date to be decided by FIFA’s executive committee on July 20. UEFA president Michel Platini, who did not attend the news conference, has not commented on whether he will run.
“It’s not a question of making deals; of course there are discussions and of course the focus has to be on saving  football,” Infantino said.
“This (July 20 meeting) will fix a date and we will take it from there,” he said. “We need some clarity and we need to work for the good of football in this situation.”
UEFA said it had been shocked by reports that Italian second division games have been fixed for 100,000 euros.
UEFA general secretary Gianni Infantino reacted after the president of Serie B club Catania reportedly admitted to buying the results of five matches in the past season.
“We are of course sad to learn what is happening. We are worried that a second division club can fix five matches paying 100,000 euros per match,” Infantino told a press conference.  
“We are worried about the situation and in general and that is why we are fighting against it.
“That’s why we are working with the prosecutors, that’s why we are working with associations.”
Italian police have arrested five people including Catania president Antonio Pulvirenti over the latest match-fixing scandal to rock Italian football. Pulvirenti made his confession on Monday, according to Gazzetta dello Sport newspaper.
“Unfortunately we are dealing with criminal organisations,” Infantino said of the Italian case.
UEFA is now using a sophisticated data collection system to monitor all first and second division games in Europe. There are also anti-fraud officers in each of UEFA’s 54 members.
But another case involving Greek champions Olympiakos has also tainted Europe football.
The Pireaus team’s owner Evangelos Marinakis has been banned from all football activities while a Greek judge looks into allegations that the shipping tycoon was part of a criminal gang that fixed Greek Super League matches between 2011 and 2013.
Infantino said that Olympiakos has been “provisionally” accepted for next season’s Champions League while the investigation goes ahead.
“These kind of investigations can take some time. We need some clear evidence.”
Infantino said that in general, UEFA “cannot start taping phone calls or going to check bank accounts or whatever. For this we need the help of the prosecutors.”