By Samindra Kunti
July 3 – The Brazilian Football Confederation CBF is negotiating a deal to stage a Brazil vs Argentina friendly in the autumn in San Francisco with Full Play, one of the companies indicted by US authorities for bribing former CBF president José Maria Marin in relation to the 2016 Copa America.
Marin was the mastermind behind the Superclassico das Americas, pitting Brazil and Argentina against each other to rekindle the local rivalry that was part and parcel of the continent’s game between 1914 and 1976 in the form of the Copa Roca.
Full Play was involved in organizing the Superclassico das Americas games. Hugo Jinkis and his son Mariano Jinkis, the owners of Full Play, are now under house arrest in Argentina, pending extradition to the US. The US authorities have accused them of bribing former CBF president Marin and another unnamed senior CBF official in relation to the 2016 Copa America, hosted by the US, via a newly-founded company Datisa.
Those bribes, it is alleged, were wired to the account of a Panamese front company at the Hapoalim bank’s Zurich branch.
Earlier this week Brazilian company Kleber Leite, also involved in the organisation of the matches, had its assets frozen by the court in Rio de Janeiro.
The CBF maintains that the match will go ahead as planned in San Francisco in September, but the Argentina Football Association AFA insists that Argentina have only scheduled a friendly against Mexico on September 8 in Texas. AFA denies a game will be played against Brazil.
When current CBF president Marco Polo Del Nero returned hastily from Zurich at the end of May, he assured in a press conference that he would review the CBF’s contracts after his predecessor was arrest. “We have to analyse all contracts,” said Del Nero. “We can not say they are bad, bad for the CBF, because things went well so far.”
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