A corrupt former football official who scalped World Cup tickets is running for parliament in the Cook Islands on an anti-corruption platform.
Lee Harmon was banned from football in 2019 for three months and fined about $30,000 for scalping tickets to 2018 Fifa World Cup games in Russia.
Harmon, who was a Fifa council member, had a plea bargain accepted by the world football body.
Fifa council members earn $400,000 a year.
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In a July post on social media advertising Harmon for the opposition Democratic Party, he is standing next to a list of policies, including anti-corruption and constitutional change.
Lee Harmon is running for parliament in the upcoming Cook Islands election on an anti-corruption platform, despite being banned from football for corruption.
Harmon is running in the August 1 parliamentary election for the Cook Islands Democratic Party.
Harmon said he wasn’t the spokesperson for anti-corruption and his party had made the image outside his control and posted it to social media.
Harmon had shared the image on his personal campaign page.
Asked how he felt about his image being used to promote anti-corruption policy – after being found to be corrupt himself – Harmon described his past as a “speeding ticket”.
“It won’t stand in a court of law,” he said. “I don’t think I’m a corrupt person.”
Harmon said he was “in the clear to run… have I broken any rules in the country? Have I committed a crime under Cook Islands law?”
But when asked why voters should elect someone who had shown they were corrupt, Harmon hung up.
Tina Brown, the leader of Harmon’s Democratic Party, denied Harmon was corrupt and said he was not an anti-corruption spokesperson.
Brown didn’t answer questions as to why the party supported a candidate who had been sanctioned for corruption by a football governing body.
Shaun Botterill/Getty Images
Russian president Vladimir Putin touches the World Cup in 2018, when his country hosted the event.
Harmon was boss of the Cook Islands Football Association (CIFA) at the time he was caught up in the ticket scandal, a position he’d held since 1997.
He was also a vice-president of the Oceania Football Confederation (OFC), one of Fifa’s six continental confederations.
The OFC banned Harmon from being on its executive for life, but he successfully appealed that in 2021, in the New Zealand High Court.
The decision didn’t overturn Harmon’s plea over the ticket scalping, but he maintained “I was cleared… do you think they clear me for nothing?”
Two months after the High Court ruling in July 2021, the OFC then banned Harmon for six years and fined him $110,000 for different charges of bribery and corruption, accepting gifts and conflicts of interest.
Harmon has since appealed that sanction too. An OFC spokesperson said they couldn’t comment on Harmon until that appeal was decided.
Harmon is running against Minister of Cultural Development George Maggie in a rematch of the 2018 and 2014 bouts for the seat of Tupapa-Maraerenga. Maggie won 559 votes to 443 in 2018 and 498 to 282 in 2014.
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