FIFA will not reopen the voting for the 2022 World Cup unless new evidence emerges, according to the German FA (DFB) president, despite a Council of Europe report claiming that the original process was "fundamentally undermined by illegality."
American lawyer Michael Garcia had led an investigation into the process that saw Russia awarded the 2018 tournament and Qatar selected as hosts for 2022 after a vote in 2010, but he quit FIFA last month in protest over the handling of his findings.
Garcia had been unhappy with the 42-page summary of his report, which was published by German judge Hans-Joachim Eckert on Nov. 13 and cleared Russia and Qatar of serious wrongdoing.
FIFA had said the publication of Eckert's report on the Garcia investigation had brought "a degree of closure," and DFB president Wolfgang Niersbach does not believe the sport's governing body has any intention of revisiting the matter.
"The case is closed from FIFA's and the FIFA ethics commission's point of view," he told dpa. "There will not be a rerun of the 2018 or 2022 votes."
Niersbach, who wants to succeed fellow German Theo Zwanziger in the FIFA Executive Committee in May, added: "You need to bring evidence to the table and show what exactly has been tainted, or even worse than that.
"If there are new facts, they have to be revealed -- and then there might be a reaction."
Niersbach was reacting to the report by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) at the weekend, which said the original vote had been "radically flawed" by illicit payments.
The PACE report's author -- UK politician Michael Connarty, who serves as a Member of Parliament for the Labour Party -- said he had found the evidence of illegal payments "unequivocal" after studying documents obtained by the Sunday Times.
The newspaper had last summer accused Mohamed Bin Hammam, banned for life by FIFA in 2012, of making the illegitimate payments to over 30 senior African football officials or their national associations on behalf of the Qatari bid.
"Given the structured action of this scale and the sums involved, there can be no doubt that that there was a 'direct correlation' between these flagrant irregularities and the outcome of the vote," Connarty said.
In response to the Bin Hammam allegations, Qatar's bid committee had said in a statement last summer: "Mohamed Bin Hammam played no official or unofficial role in Qatar's 2022 bid committee. We vehemently deny all allegations of wrong-doing."
However, Connarty added in the PACE report: "FIFA cannot evade the obligation to hold a new vote under its new rules on the allocation of major events including the World Cup. The claim that Qatar does not have direct responsibility for Mr Bin Hammam's dealings should not be allowed to validate a procedure so fundamentally undermined by illegality."