FIFA’s ethics committee said yesterday that it has the authority to investigate all allegations of corruption – new and old – concerning football’s governing body.

But the newly-appointed chairmen of the committee’s investigatory and adjudicatory chambers, Michael J. Garcia and Hans-Joachim Eckert, refused to say whether that meant they would consider the past dealings of Sepp Blatter.

Revelations about Blatter’s predecessor Joao Havelange taking huge bribes from marketing firm ISL continue to dog the current president.

Garcia refused to talk about specific cases at a news conference in Zurich but said there were “no limitations between past and future” and no restrictions “at all on what we’ll be looking at”.

The announcement comes a day after the ethics committee provisionally banned Qatar’s Mohamed Bin Hammam for 90 days pending the outcome of a probe into Asian Football Confederation (AFC) finances.

Garcia said the committee planned to launch a “preliminary” inquiry into the events that culminated in Bin Hammam’s lifetime ban for allegedly making corrupt payments, which was overturned by the CAS last week.