October 27 – As anticipated, Michel Platini’s appeal against his 90-day suspension has not got off to the best of starts, with the first of many stages in the process thrown out.
The UEFA president has had a first procedural appeal rejected, his representatives revealed, stressing there is a long way to go yet until he is definitively ruled out of the FIFA presidential race.
Platini’s lawyers had registered two objections with FIFA’s appeals committee. The first concerned the process, the second the substantive issue. The appeal that was rejected concerned Platini’s insistence that he had not been granted a fair hearing by the ethics committee which suspended him provisionally pending a full investigation into allegations over his acceptance in 2011 of a ‘disloyal payment’ from FIFA on the authorisation of Sepp Blatter.
“This decision is not that of the (FIFA) appeals committee, for which no date has yet been communicated to Platini,” the Frenchman’s counsel said in a statement sent to AFP.
His lawyers added that they are “convinced the appeals will eventually show his complete integrity and restore all his rights.”
Platini, whose number two Gianni Infantino has entered the race in case he is unable to clear his name, has vowed to go all the way to the Court of Arbitration for Sport whose judgements cannot be challenged. But he runs the risk in the meantime of receiving an extended ban.
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