South Africa threaten legal action

The South African bid committee chairman Irvin Khoza has dismissed Charles Dempsey's claims that he was pressurised into abstention and announced that they are considering legal action over last week's World Cup 2006 vote.

The committee was due to meet lawyers yesterday to seek advice on what action was open to them over New Zealander Dempsey's crucial abstention, which cost South Africa the chance of staging the event for the first time.

Beleaguered Dempsey has claimed that he abstained from voting in the crucial World Cup ballot to avoid offending powerful, and mostly European, FIFA representatives.

At a press conference in Auckland, the long-serving Oceania Football Confederation (OFC) president also insisted he had been given a free hand to vote as he saw fit.

"The decision I made was for football and was not a political issue," he said.

"The night before the FIFA meeting I received a number of anonymous calls which disturbed me, one of them was a threatening call. "It had also been made clear to me by influential European interests that if I cast my vote in favour of South Africa there would be adverse effects for OFC in FIFA."

But Khoza rejected Dempsey's argument, and said: "This thing about an under pressure is a lot of nonsense.

"Anyone who knows Dempsey . . . nothing can unravel and ruffle him."

And South Africa's bid ambassador Terry Paine, the former England and Southampton player, added that he thought Dempsey neglected his duty to vote as he had claimed he would and as OFC wanted him to.

He said: "The vote for South Africa was demanded by his association. It was as simple as that.

"He is not a wild card. He is mandated to vote on behalf of Oceania, and that is what he should have done."

Meanwhile, South Africa's Sports Minister Ngconde Balfour is planning to visit New Zealand within two weeks to heal the wounds caused by Dempsey's action, his spokesman Graham Abrahams said. The visit is "not to discuss the disaster exclusively but to discuss sporting contacts with New Zealand", Abrahams said. "Obviously sporting contacts have taken a bit of a battering and New Zealand feels bad about it," he added.