By Andrew Warshaw
January 6 – Jerome Valcke, the forgotten man in the FIFA corruption scandal who has been out of the game since being relieved of his duties as general-secretary back in October, faces a far longer spell on the sidelines following the recommendation of a nine-year ban by FIFA’s ethics committee.
Valcke had his initial 90-day suspension extended today by 45 days, permissible under ethics rules, 24 hours after ethics investigators recommended the extension as well as a nine-year ban over alleged wrongdoing.
A statement from the ethics committee also recommended Valcke pay a fine of SFr100,000 for alleged “misuse of expenses and other infringements of FIFA’s rules and regulations”.
Until Sepp Blatter and Michel Platini were banned for eight years apiece last month, overshadowing Valcke’s case, the 55-year FIFA number two was the highest profile figure to be sanctioned. He has described the allegations against him as “fabricated and outrageous” but it is understood that the case against him is far more wide-reaching than the ticket fiasco – as the ethics statement would indicate.
Blatter’s former right-hand man has faced considerable scrutiny over being party to the infamous $10 million payment paid by South Africa, ostensibly as a donation to the African diaspora in the Caribbean as part of the country’s 2010 World Cup legacy programme but which ended up in the hands of disgraced former CONCACAF president Jack Warner who was recently banned for life.
The money is said to have been transferred in 2008 from a FIFA bank account following a request to Valcke from the South African football authorities. Valcke, identified as having processed the transfer, has vehemently denied he did anything wrong insisting he strictly followed normal protocol.
Valcke first discovered he had been cast aside while on a charter flight to Russia where he had been heading for celebrations marking 1,000 days to the country’s staging of the 2018 World Cup. He turned round in mid-flight and his FIFA duties have since been taken over on an interim basis by FIFA finance director Markus Kattner.
Valcke says the payment in question was authorised by then-finance committee chairman Julio Grondona. US investigators probing sport’s worst ever corruption scandal claim the money was a bribe for CONCACAF officials to support South Africa’s successful bid to host the 2010 World Cup.
The chairman of the FIFA ethics committee’s investigative arm, Cornel Borbely, recommended the ban on Tuesday after concluding his investigation. In all, the 55-year-old Frenchman, who for years acted as the trouble-shooting face of FIFA’s scandal-wracked hierarchy, is accused of violating six articles of the code of ethics, including confidentiality and conflict of interest.
Valcke’s legal team responded by claiming the ethics committee ignored his “exemplary conduct and extraordinary contributions during his long tenure.”
The statement described the ethics announcement as “a self-serving public relations effort to wrongly attack Mr. Valcke in a desperate attempt to try to prove that FIFA can police itself. Mr. Valcke did absolutely nothing wrong as any independent and fair review of the facts would establish.”
A final decision will come from ethics judge Hans-Joachim Eckert, who last month banned Blatter and Platini both of whom are appealing. Valcke had been expected to leave FIFA anyway after the election of a new president on February 26.
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