Russia's Sports Minister Vitaly Mutko said he was not surprised by the results of the FIFA Ethics Committee report on the bidding process for the 2018 and 2022 World Cup released Thursday.
"There was nothing in particular that was unexpected from the FIFA commission," Mutko said, Reuters reported.
"We tried to convince the members of the executive committee that Russia is a worthy partner in world sport and that we will do everything that is asked of us," he said.
"It's good to put a line under this and I hope we will not have talk about this again. We will keep on preparing to host the 2018 World Cup."
The long-awaited FIFA report released Thursday concluded it could not find any evidence of misconduct connected to the Russian bid for the 2018 World Cup, although it added that not all records had been available to the investigation.
"The Russia 2018 Bid Committee made only a limited amount of documents available for review, which was explained by the fact that the computers used at the time by the Russia Bid Committee had been leased and then returned to their owner after the Bidding Process. The owner has confirmed that the computers were destroyed in the meantime," the report said.
Alexei Sorokin, Director General of Russia 2018 Organizing Committee said Russia had fully cooperated with FIFA officials.
"We passed on all we could to the investigation. You must understand that it's taken been four years, and some information simply gets forgotten about," R-Sport news agency quoted him as saying.
"We are confident that our application was transparent. We didn't allow any violations. We were always confident that nothing illegal would be found. This is something that FIFA decided they had to do and they did it," he said.
"The nomination committee rented computers, and then, as they had to do, returned them. There was no point buying the equipment at that time because it was a short-term project. We even rented furniture. We cooperated fully with the investigation. They asked us questions, and we answered them. We didn't delete any emails, we rented the computers and then returned them, and then they were used by other people."
