Chief ethics investigator Cornel Borbely and ethics judge Hans-Joachim Eckert on Wednesday (May 10) said that the reform of FIFA had been rolled back by years and FIFA’s code of ethics was “a dead letter”.

On Tuesday (May 9) the ruling council of world soccer’s governing body ousted the pair, issuing a statement saying Colombian investigator Maria Claudia Rojas had been nominated as the new head of the investigatory chamber with Vassilios Skouris of Greece, a former president of the European Court of Justice, put forward as head of the adjudicatory chamber.

Several dozen soccer officials, mainly from Latin America, were indicted in the United States in 2015 on corruption-related charges, sparking the worst crisis in FIFA’s history.

German Eckert and Swiss Borbely were at the forefront of efforts to clear up corruption in the organisation and had expressed a desire to continue the work beyond the end of their current mandates, which run until Thursday’s FIFA Congress.

“The removal of the Ethics Committee is not in FIFA’s best interest. It’s against good governance and it’s a setback for the fight against corruption. The Ethics Committee is weakened and incapacitated. The knowhow, the experience of the investigators, of the judges is not translated to the next chamber. This rolls reforms back by years. FIFA will suffer because of this and without the functioning Ethics Committee, the FIFA code of ethics is a dead letter, ” said Borboly.

Eckert said he wondered if the work to combat corruption would continue, as it has for the last four years.