The Asian Football Confederation (AFC), despite multiple legal inquiries into global soccer governance and a massive corruption scandal, has rehired as a consultant its former general secretary, Dato’ Alex Soosay, less than a year after his departure as a result of this blog’s disclosure of Mr. Soosay’s attempt to undermine an independent audit by requesting tampering with or destruction of documents.’

Mr. Soosay’s hiring, barely a month after AFC President Sheikh Salman Bin Ibrahim Al-Khalifa was defeated in elections for the head of troubled world soccer body FIFA, suggests that many regional and global soccer executives have yet to absorb the full impact of the corruption scandals and care little about appearances. Mr. Salman’s own record, particularly with regard to human rights, cast a shadow over his FIFA candidacy.

The AFC as a body has so far not been named in legal investigations by Swiss and US authorities that have already led to multiple indictments but is indirectly involved given that its former president, Mohammed Bin Hammam, is at the centre of the Swiss investigation and believed to be an unidentified co-conspirator in US indictments. It was documents related to an independent audit into Mr. Bin Hammam’s financial management of the AFC that Mr. Soosay allegedly sought to have altered or destroyed.

… Dr James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, co-director of the University of Würzburg’s Institute for Fan Culture, and the author of The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer blog and a forthcoming book with the same title.