Boris Johnson: London stands ready to host the World CupFifa

London “stands ready” to host the World Cup if the contest which awarded it to Russia and Qatar five years ago turns out to have been “corrupted”, Boris Johnson said today.
The Mayor also piled pressure on ’s sponsors to pull the plug on football’s world governing body “if they had any sense of honour”. He claimed there had been a “fix” when England crashed out of the competition to host the 2018 World Cup and it was instead awarded to Russia.
Sepp Blatter was re-elected as Fifa president amid divisions at the heart of Uefa, Europe’s football governing body, ahead of a crunch meeting last Friday. Mr Johnson stressed today that the “French and Spanish Fifa wallahs decided, amazingly, to vote for Blatter” despite the FBI inquiry into the organisation and the arrest of officials on suspicion of decades of bribe-taking.
Writing in his Telegraph column, the Mayor added: “All we can do is watch events, send whatever evidence we have to the Americans, and live in hope. And if the Swiss police indeed show that the 2010 contest was corrupted, then it will have to be re-run. London stands ready.”
It also emerged that three banks named in a US indictment are reviewing payments set out in the document. Barclays, HSBC and Standard Chartered were allegedly used to transfer cash as part of the conspiracy.
Standard Chartered said last week it was aware two payments it had cleared were mentioned in the indictment and it was looking into them. Barclays and HSBC have not commented.
However, Barclays is understood to be reviewing specific transactions while the HSBC payments were believed to be the type that were routinely looked into. The Serious Fraud Office has said it is actively assessing “material in its  possession” relating to the corruption allegations.