"Our meeting with the representatives of FIFA and UEFA, along with the president of HFF ended, it was an interesting conversation but we did not reach an agreement. They asked us to take back our decision about the continuance of Greek Cup and the Hellenic Football Federation are willing to drop their petition to State Council. We responded that our government is not afraid of courts or european eliminations, but FIFA want the competition of Greek Cup to be continued in order to start serious talks about greek football's problems.
The government asked, in order to start speaking about that issue, from the Hellenic Football Federation to fight with some measures against corruption in greek football, by punishing all the officials and referees who are accused of criminal activity and have restricted orders instead of rewarding them. FIFA want the Greek Cup to start before any further action and this was our main disagreement.
The international associations have started to understand the situation in Greece and are positive for foreign referees in important matches and games' interruption as a final measure against violence. The most important for us is social peace and justice, we are expecting the official statement from FIFA to respond with our propositions.
The decision of FIFA is to ban the Hellenic Football Federation from international associations, they have the problem and we can't do nothing about it or force them to take some measures. If they want, they can solve it with some action in order to end a state of corruption which has been exceeding here for many years. We have also asked for immediate work from Ethics Committee in order to help justice.
The government has no intention to interfere with football's self-administration, I even brought a decision from European Court which proves that we did nothing illegal, we interrupted the Greek Cup to avoid even worse situations. When you hear from the representatives of FIFA that maybe Super League should had also been interrupted or to think about using foreign referees, that means that they generally agree with our actions", said Stavros Kontonis.
