By Andrew Warshaw
April 7 – A member of the FIFA body responsible for rooting out corruption has himself resigned after being placed under investigation over his offshore business dealings exposed in the Panama Papers tax haven leak, heaping damage on the accountability and credibility at the heart of football’s world governing just when it is trying to restore its battered reputation.
Juan Pedro Damiani, a FIFA’s ethics committee judge, stepped down after he and his law firm were found to have provided assistance for at least seven offshore companies linked to disgraced fellow Uruguayan Eugenio Figueredo, a former FIFA vice-president and one of the original Zurich Seven arrested last May as part of the US inquiry into wire fraud and money laundering that brought FIFA to its knees.
Damiani was recently placed under investigation by ethics prosecutors after being identified in the vast leak of data from the files of Mossack Fonseca, the Panamanian firm specialising in tax avoidance schemes.
“We can confirm that Mr. Damiani resigned from his position as member of the adjudicatory chamber of the independent Ethics Committee of FIFA,” an ethics committee spokesman said.
His exit, after helping to ban a string of FIFA powerbrokers over the years for various misdemeanours – not least former president Sepp Blatter – is a highly embarrassing development for the new FIFA leadership in its efforts to rebuild trust and confidence in the corruption-scarred organisation.
The revelation that Damiani, who has been a member of ethics committee since 2006, had conducted business with Figueredo, was the first serious setback for new FIFA president Gianni Infantino in his campaign to clean up the organisation. Infantino’s own credibility has since been questioned over his role in signing off a Champions League rights deal, a decade ago when he was at UEFA, with an offshore company based in a remote Pacific island.
Damiani did not tell the FIFA ethics committee until March that he and his family’s law firm had had a “business relationship” with Figueredo but on Wednesday released a copy of the strongly worded resignation letter he sent to Hans-Joachim Eckert, the German chairman of the ethics committee’s adjudicatory chamber, protesting his innocence.
“In recent days my good name and the reputation of my firm and fellow professionals who work for it have been sullied with baseless allegations which bring my ethical conduct into question,” he wrote.
“It would not serve appropriately both FIFA and this [ethics] committee – or the transparency in football for which I have struggled – if I did not step aside over the slightest suspicion, even if unfounded.”
Figueredo is accused of receiving bribes worth millions of dollars from a Uruguayan sports marketing company in connection with the sale of marketing rights to the Copa América tournaments in 2015, 2016, 2019 and 2023.
Although most of the leading football officials indicted in the US Department of Justice investigation have been extradited there, in December Figueredo was extradited instead to his homeland where he has pleaded guilty to fraud and money laundering. Uruguayan prosecutors said in February that he had agreed to hand over more than $10 million in stocks and property in a deal to reduce his eventual punishment.
But Damiani said media reports of his dealings with Figueredo were wide of the mark.
“Neither in a personal capacity or through our firm in a commercial capacity did I undertake any business with or for Mr Eugenio Figueredo, or for any of the other persons mentioned in newspaper articles reported in recent days,” he wrote.
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