The secrets of how Qatar’s top football chief exploited its vast wealth to help win crucial votes for its World Cup bid are revealed in explosive documents leaked to The Sunday Times.

Fresh disclosures from the FIFA files show how Mohamed bin Hammam, the disgraced FIFA vice-president, pulled strings at the top of government and with the country’s royal family to arrange meetings and favours for key voters in the months leading up to the World Cup ballot.

The Qatar 2022 committee has maintained that it has no links to Bin Hammam since this newspaper last week exposed the slush funds he used to make secret payments of more than $5m in his campaign to seal support for the tiny country’s World Cup dream.

But fresh disclosures from the documents today threaten to blow a hole in its claims that he was an “entirely separate” individual with “no official or unofficial role in the bid”.

Pressure on world football’s governing body, FIFA, to take action over this newspaper’s evidence intensified last night when the first of its big sponsors, the Japanese electronics giant Sony, broke ranks and called for the damning disclosures to be “investigated appropriately”.

Ed Miliband, the Labour leader, piled on further pressure, telling The Sunday Times that there would be an “overwhelming case for the bidding process to be reopened immediately” if the “startling” evidence in the FIFA files was proven.

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