By Andrew Warshaw
February 22 – As he awaits the imminent outcome of his appeal against his eight-year ban and the election of his successor, Sepp Blatter insists the December 2010 vote to host the 2022 World Cup in Qatar was clean, but has repeated that political influences played a role in the infamous ballot that went some way to prompting the biggest scandal in FIFA history.
“You cannot buy a World Cup,” Blatter, who is understood to have voted for the United States, told The Times newspaper. “(But) it will go at the end where the higher political influences are. Look at my face when I opened the envelope.”
Blatter, whose 18 years in office comes to a close on Friday, re-ignited the debate over the reasons why UEFA president Michel Platini openly voted for Qatar.
Platini has always denied being pressured to vote for the Gulf state by Nicolas Sarkozy, the then French president, but Blatter says that Platini telephoned him to explain what had happened after a dinner at the Elysee Palace in late 2010.
“For 2022, Platini at least had the courtesy to phone me and say, ‘now we have had a meeting with the head of state and if the head of state is asking me to support France for different reasons then I will’. He was very correct, he phoned me and said my vote will not be for the Americans.
“He said if a head of state is asking you, you can still say yes or no, but in the interests of France … I knew then there would be a problem, we tried but it was too late. It was one week or 10 days before the vote. I tried to see what votes were left for the US but four votes were lost.”
With US and Swiss anti-corruption investigators widely rumoured to be co-ordinating another swoop on FIFA officials to co-incide with Friday’s electoral congress in Zurich, Blatter again protested his innocence over the “disloyal payment” made to Platini in 2011, which saw both of them banned by FIFA’s ethics committee.
Both had their respective appeals within 24 hours of each other heard last week but Blatter told The Times they not spoken since the day they became embroiled in FIFA’s burgeoning scandal.
“I have never had a contact with Platini since we were picked up after the meeting of the executive committee,” Blatter said. “We were picked up by the Swiss police and put in a room and I asked him: ‘Do you know what they want from us?’ He said ‘no’ and they have seen that we are speaking and they have separated us. Only later I knew why they wanted to see us. There has been no contact, no telephone, nothing.”
“I have killed nobody, I have not robbed a bank, I have not taken any money from anywhere.”
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