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• Bin Hammam withdraws from presidential election • ‘I will walk with my head held high,’ he says Mohamed bin Hammam has withdrawn from the race to become the next Fifa president and has vowed to clear his name when he appears before the body’s ethics committee. The president of the Asian Football Confederation is facing bribery allegations, alongside the Fifa vice-president Jack Warner, while the organisation’s current president Sepp Blatter is also being investigated for knowing about alleged bribery. Bin Hammam’s decision to pull out of the election means Blatter is currently unopposed in his attempt to secure a fourth term as the head of world football at Wednesday’s vote. Bin Hammam said: “I pray that my withdrawal will not be tied to the investigation held by the Fifa Ethics Committee as I will appear before the Ethics Committee to clear my name from the baseless allegations that have been made against me. “I promise those who stood by me that I will walk with my head held high and will continue to fight for the good of the game. “I have a special thank you to my friend and colleague Jack Warner for his unlimited support. I am sorry to see that he has to suffer because of me, but I am promising him that I will be with him all the way through thick and thin. “I look forward to working closely with my colleagues to restore Fifa’s reputation to what it should be – a protector of the game that has credibility through honesty, transparency and accountability.” Bin Hammam added: “It saddens me that standing up for the causes that I believed in has come at a great price – the degradation of FIFA’s reputation. This is not what I had in mind for FIFA and this is unacceptable. “I cannot allow the game that I love to be dragged more and more in the mud because of competition between two individuals. The game itself and the people who love it around the world must come first. It is for this reason that I announce my withdrawal from the presidential election.” Bin Hammam’s withdrawal from the Fifa presidential elections is only one hurdle for Blatter to overcome in his attempt to extend his tenure into a fourth term. The corruption allegations that have engulfed world football and destroyed Bin Hammam’s candidacy also threaten him: like the Qatari challenger, he faces an ethics committee hearing on Sunday. Blatter is accused of having given his approval to the payments allegedly arranged by Bin Hammam and Jack Warner for Caribbean Football Union officials. The ethics committee hearing arises after Bin Hammam and Warner were found in an inquiry conducted by the Concacaf confederation’s lawyer, John Collins, to have made $40,000 payments to Caribbean-based football federation officials. Both deny the charge. Collins’s inquiry also discovered that Warner had alleged Blatter was aware of the payments before the controversial CFU meeting took place. Bin Hammam subsequently raised the matter with Fifa’s general secretary, Jérôme Valcke, who referred it to the ethics committee as a matter of course. It is within the ethics committee’s power to ban all three men from all football activity if the charges are proven. However Warner warned he will blow the whistle on wider issues that beset Fifa, talking of a “football tsunami” . “The time has come when I must stop playing dead, it’s coming, trust me you’ll see it,” Warner told Trinidad and Tobago’s press. Mohamed bin Hammam Fifa Football politics Matt Scott guardian.co.uk