Fifa honorary president Joao Havelenge has resigned after being named in a report as having received bribes.
The report by Fifa’s ethics chairman Hans-Joachim Eckert also names Nicolas Leoz for taking kickbacks from World Cup rights marketing agency International Sport and Leisure.
Leoz resigned from the governing body’s executive committee last week.
He was accused in the report of being “not fully candid” in his explanations over the affair.
However while the report says that payments to Havelenge, Leoz and the former Fifa executive Ricardo Teixeira qualified as bribes they were not crimes at the time.
Fifa granted ISL exclusive rights to market World Cup tournaments to some of the world’s biggest brands and ISL received millions more from negotiating television broadcast rights.
The company collapsed with huge debts in 2001 and its arrangement with Fifa was subsequently investigated by Swiss authorities.
Fifa was last year forced by the Swiss supreme court to release documents relating to the case after repeated attempts to block the confidential papers’ release.
It followed a report by the BBC’s Panorama programme in 2010 which alleged three senior Fifa officials took bribes from Swiss-based ISL in the 1990s.
Fifa president Sepp Blatter announced in July 2012 that Fifa’s new ethics committee would be looking at the bribery allegations. That investigation resulted in the release of Tuesday’s report.
The report says: “It is certain that not inconsiderable amounts were channelled to former Fifa president Havelange and to his son-in-law Ricardo Teixeira as well as to Dr Nicolas Leoz, whereby there is no indication that any form of service was given in return by them.
“These payments were apparently made via front companies in order to cover up the true recipient and are to be qualified as ‘commissions’, known today as ‘bribes’.”
The report states that Havelenge and Teixeira were “morally and ethically reproachable” for accepting the money.
Leoz told investigators he donated the money he received to a school project – but only in January 2008.
The report states that payments were made between 1992 and May 2000.
Questions over Fifa president Sepp Blatter’s conduct have also been raised in the past but the report says there is no evidence he received money from the now-defunct ISL.
But it does raise questions about whether Blatter should have known about the bribes to other executives and labels his behaviour in dealing with aspects of the affair as “clumsy”.
“There are also no indications whatsoever that President Blatter was responsible for a cash flow to Havelange, Teixeira or Leoz, or that that he himself received any payments from the ISL Group, even in the form of hidden kickback payments.
“It must be questioned, however, whether President Blatter knew or should have known over the years before the bankruptcy of ISL that ISL had made payments (bribes) to other Fifa officials.”
Eckert is also critical about the controls that Fifa had in place to prevent such corruption from occurring.
In response to the publication of the report Blatter said: “I note in particular that, in his conclusions, chairman Eckert states that ‘the ISL case is concluded for the Ethics Committee’ and that ‘no further proceedings related to the ISL matter are warranted against any other football official’.
“I also note with satisfaction that this report confirms that ‘President Blatter’s conduct could not be classified in any way as misconduct with regard to any ethics rules’.
“I have no doubt that Fifa, thanks to the governance reform process that I proposed, now has the mechanisms and means to ensure that such an issue – which has caused untold damage to the reputation of our institution – does not happen again.”