December 12 – The president of French Ligue 1 side Bastia, Pierre-Marie Geronimi (pictured), has been arrested and placed in police custody as part of an investigation into the club’s finances.
The investigation surrounds funding of an artificial pitch installed at the club’s youth training ground and payments made to club partners, including a transport company.
A statement by the Corsican-based club, currently bottom of the table, confirmed Geronimi had appeared before the region’s prosecutor but denied “any wrongdoing or irregular cash flow” relating to the pitch’s installation, saying payments made for minibus hire to transport players to its training centre were totally “justified”. It didn’t say, however, why he had been detained.
Last month in one of the harshest rulings meted out for an on-the-field offence, Bastia’s Brazilian striker Brandao was handed a one-month jail sentence for headbutting Paris St-Germain midfielder Thiago Motta, a sentence expected to be commuted to community service.
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