The suitability of Fifa’s ethics investigator to do the job has been seriously called into question in a severely critical report on football’s world governing body’s governance under the presidency of Gianni Infantino. The Council of Europe report states that María Claudia Rojas, the Colombian judge appointed in May to chair Fifa’s ethics committee’s investigatory branch, does not have the requisite experience of conducting criminal or financial investigations.

“Also,” the report sates, “her lack of knowledge of English and French is a major obstacle, as almost all documents [relevant to the investigations] are in one of these two languages. This is not merely a factor that risks slowing her down in her examination of case files … but it also means – and this is much more problematic – that she is more dependent on the [Fifa] secretariat that assists her and that it is objectively difficult for her to enter into confidential contacts with witnesses or experts.”

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Written by Anne Brasseur, a Luxembourg Democratic Party representative and former president of the Council of Europe’s parliamentary assembly, the report questions whether Rojas is making progress with investigations. Brasseur concludes generally that Fifa’s summary removal of the ethics and governance committee chairmen in May undermined the independence of the newly reformed integrity procedures.

This stinging assessment comes as Infantino’s Fifa is failing to act on the revelations of Russian state-sponsored doping which finally led to the International Olympic Committee banning Russia from the forthcoming Winter Olympics and a life ban for Vitaly Mutko, the deputy prime minister for sport, tourism and youth policy. Mutko’s continuing tenure as president of the Russian football association and organising committee for next year’s World Cup presents Infantino’s Fifa with its clearest test of integrity, since the multiple bribery and financial corruption scandals which led to the fall of the former president Sepp Blatter.

Rojas is responsible for investigating Mutko and any other implications for football, including alleged doping of Russian players, arising out of the two reports by professor Richard McLaren for the World Anti-Doping Agency, and further damning evidence gathered by the Schmid Commission for the IOC. Fifa has offered no news of whether any investigation is ongoing or making progress, seven months since Rojas was appointed after the removal of the Swiss prosecutor Cornel Borbély as ethics committee investigatory chairman, without notice.

Infantino presented Rojas’s appointment then as a positive move towards greater gender and geographic diversity and the Fifa council, on which the English FA’s representative David Gill sits as a Fifa vice-president, unanimously supported Borbély’s replacement by her.

Borbély and Hans-Joachim Eckert, the German judge whose tenure chairing the ethics committee’s adjudicatory branch, which determines sanctions, was also summarily ended, warned then that hundreds of cases were ongoing and the fight against wrongdoing and corruption had been “incapacitated”. One of those investigations was into Mutko’s alleged involvement in Russia’s systematic doping of athletes, which Borbély had begun, and which is known to include a huge volume of documents in English, including 915 already translated from Russian for McLaren.

In the summer, it was revealed that Borbély had at the time of his removal two ethics investigations ongoing against Infantino, one into complaints that he interfered in the election of a new president at the Confederation of African Football, the other for allegedly under-declaring the budget he was given by Uefa, where he was previously general secretary, to campaign for the Fifa presidency.

Brasseur interviewed Borbély, Eckert, the ousted governance committee chair Miguel Maduro, Infantino, the Fifa general secretary Fatma Samoura, Rojas and other key people. She criticises Rojas for having stated publicly after her appointment that there were no ongoing investigations into Infantino. Brasseur found that Rojas had made that statement “before learning about all of the files, including the more sensitive files that … Mr Borbély still had in his possession”.

Infantino acknowledged to Brasseur that he had sought in March to intervene with the decision of Maduro’s governance committee to bar Mutko from the Fifa council because of Fifa’s rules that members must be politically neutral. Brasseur’s report confirms what Maduro has said previously, that Infantino believed any action against Mutko would have “potential consequences for the organisation of the 2018 World Cup in Russia”.

Brasseur says of Rojas, and Vassilios Skouris, who was appointed to replace Eckert, that they are “two professionals of the highest level and of the highest integrity”. However of Rojas’s suitability for the investigative role, she says the work “calls for experience in the field of criminal investigations, especially financial investigations, which Ms Rojas does not have. She does not really meet the profile of a ‘prosecutor’.”

Brasseur cites her “surprise” in the report, which will be debated by the parliamentary assembly in January, that Rojas has not even met Borbély, saying that “is not very effective” for the management of the investigation files.

Describing as “regrettable” the abrupt removal of Borbély, Eckert and Maduro, and previously Domenico Scala’s resignation as chair of Fifa’s audit and compliance committee in protest at the Fifa council being given the right to fire independent chairmen, Brasseur concludes: “Regretfully, the general feeling is that Fifa council and Mr Infantino in particular wished to get rid of persons who might have embarrassed them.”

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Fifa did not respond to this, the assessment of Rojas’s suitability or questions about the progress of investigations, but issued a furious statement attacking Brasseur’s objectivity. A spokesman emphasised that Fifa “has fully independent judicial bodies in place, state of the art checks and balances and advanced compliance and oversight mechanisms”.

The statement said: “All these pioneering reforms are not properly acknowledged in the current report and it is unfortunate that the author chose not to distinguish between the new Fifa and the old one, creating a misleading view of the current reality based on personal opinions and rumours, rather than on a thorough analysis and objective facts.”

Brasseur told the Guardian she was not surprised by this response, saying that she did not have “a good feeling” about the will at Fifa to implement the reforms.

“I think it is a systemic problem at Fifa,” she said. “Those who are there want to stay there, because it is a marvellous job, and very well paid of course. They aren’t happy if you criticise.”