By Andrew Warshaw
July 4 – Fresh revelations by the German news magazine Der Spiegel have added another layer of intrigue over whether FIFA president Gianni Infantino was under renewed investigation at the time both of FIFA’s two main ethics bosses were relieved of their duties in May.
Last month FIFA issued a statement denying any proceedings against Infantino following a Guardian newspaper report that alleged a fresh probe had been opened into his conduct before the removal of Swiss prosecutor Cornel Borbely and German judge Hans-Joachim Eckert from FIFA’s investigatory and judicial chambers.
Infantino was the primary actor in engineering those changes which have been widely interpreted as being driven by political objectives.
The FIFA statement quoted Borbely’s successor, María Claudia Rojas, as confirming that “there are no open preliminary or investigation proceedings involving the FIFA President.”
But Der Spiegel claims this was misleading since, it alleged, Borbely was still in possession of documents which suggested otherwise.
According to Der Spiegel, which among others reported Infantino’s suspected influence in the recent Confederation of African Football presidential election, Borbély asked for a meeting a few weeks ago to discuss the transfer of the relevant documents.
His request remained unanswered, the magazine claimed, with FIFA instead announcing there was no investigation against Infantino.
Reinhard Grindel, president of the German federation and a new outspoken member of FIFA’s ruling Council, told Spiegel that if the allegations were true, Infantino should not have been allowed to authorise the removal of Borbely and Eckert which caused widespread controversy at the time and who only discovered their mandates were being terminated within hours of the decision being taken.
At the closing press conference of the Confederations Cup, Infantino ridiculed Grindel on comments he had made about doping in football, saying he had a new idea every day.
New idea or not, the issues are not going away Infantino whose ‘fake news’ claims invoke parallels to other leaders of the free world.
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