By Andrew Warshaw
April 11 – Gianni Infantino has issued his most stinging rebuttal to date of any wrongdoing in the Panama Papers affair. The new FIFA president describes the way his involvement has been reported as a “disgrace”.
In an interview with the German magazine Kicker Infantino said he acted completely above board when, in a previous role as legal chief of UEFA, he signed off a Champions League rights deal with the owners of an offshore firm in a remote Pacific island.
Last week Swiss police searched UEFA headquarters in Nyon as part of a “criminal mismanagement” probe into the agreement signed in 2006. UEFA’s marketing partner, Team Marketing, sold the rights to broadcast games in Uruguay to Cross Trading, a firm owned by Argentinian father and son duo Hugo and Mariano Jinkis, who are among 42 football officials and entities facing corruption charges in the United States as part of the FifaGate scandal.
The deal was revealed in the leak of 11 million documents that provides detailed information about more than 214,000 offshore companies listed by the Panamanian firm Mossack Fonseca.
There is no evidence that anyone at UEFA acted illegally but questions have been raised about why they dealt with an unknown offshore company rather than a recognised broadcaster. UEFA says it had no knowledge at the time that Cross Trading would end up selling on the rights for three times the price to Ecuadorian broadcaster Teleamazonas.
“The whole process was correct and well documented,” Infantino told Kicker. “The way it has been presented is simply a disgrace.
“The agency’s marketing team had recommended that the highest of only two tenders received a contract for the ancillary rights.
“The contract was negotiated by the marketing team in detail and examined by two divisions of UEFA, which according to standard procedure, was signed by two UEFA directors.
“In this case, I was one of the two directors, but depending on availability, it could have been two other directors.
“If, after the contract was concluded, the rights-buyers carried out some unfair transactions, neither UEFA nor I had any personal influence over that.”
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