By Andrew Warshaw
April 15 – Former FIFA president Sepp Blatter has hailed the dropping of criminal mismanagement charges against him by Swiss prosecutors as a partial success in his bid to clear name and has dragged his successor Gianni Infantino into the narrative by implying Infantino was partly behind a conspiracy against him.
Blatter is still under a six-year global ban from football despite always protesting his innocence and learned last week that the Swiss attorney general’s office is to close an investigation into his alleged deal with the Caribbean Football Union (CFU), then under control of the infamous Jack Warner, to sell World Cup broadcasting rights on the cheap.
Swiss prosecutors had investigated Blatter for signing a contract with the CFU that was unfavourable to FIFA. The contract granted television rights for the 2010 and 2014 World Cups to the CFU for $600,000 dollars, an amount deemed to be way below market price.
The CFU at the time was led by Warner, who was FIFA’s longest-serving vice-president and also ran Concacaf before being banned from football for life and indicted for corruption as part of the FIFAgate scandal. He is still somehow managing to fight extradition to the United States in his native Trinidad.
The Swiss prosecution led to widespread speculation that Blatter did some kind of deal with Warner who allegedly licensed the rights to a company controlled by his family and sold them on for a reported $20 million. When he resigned from FIFA in 2011, he claimed he was handed undervalued World Cup rights in exchange for helping Blatter win re-election.
But the veteran Swiss, whose 17-year hold on power ended in the wake of the Swiss probe that was intrinsically linked to the FIFAgate scandal (in which he has never been charged) has now learned that he will not be prosecuted over this specific case and told Insideworldfootball via his official spokesman that justice had been partially done.
“This is a partial victory. It gives me energy and confidence,” said 84-year-old Blatter who let be known, for the first time, that the CFA contract included an important clause for FIFA.
“Something must be added to this process that has hardly been mentioned before,” he disclosed.
“The contract for the sale of the TV rights for the World Cup 2010 and 2014 with the Caribbean Football Union, which I signed, contained the passage that 50 percent of the profit had to go back to FIFA if it was resold. Without this addition, I would not have signed the contract.”
Blatter, of course, still faces a second criminal investigation over the controversial payment of two million Swiss francs to then UEFA chief Michel Platini, in February 2011 – four years before he was ousted as FIFA president.
Blatter is sticking to the view that he did nothing wrong and that the infamous “disloyal payment” to Platini in 2011 for consultancy work carried out a decade earlier was above board even though under Swiss law, a payment is disloyal if it is against the best interest of the employer.
He says that “a trial against me is not logical” though more eye-catching perhaps are strong hints that Infantino was complicit in conspiring against him during dealings with Swiss attorney general Michael Lauber.
Last month Lauber, who led the Swiss investigations into FIFA, was sanctioned for disloyalty, lying and breaching his office’s code of conduct following an investigation that partly focussed on undocumented meetings between himself and Infantino. And this week Switzerland’s federal court went a step further by preventing Lauber’s bid to rejoin investigations of corruption into FIFA.
Unofficial dealings between Lauber and Infantino, just as the latter was considering seeking the FIFA presidency, have led to questions that go right to the heart of the independence of the Swiss judiciary as well as to the integrity of FIFA.
Blatter is convinced some kind of collusion took place, facilitated, he claims, by Rinaldo Arnold, a local prosecutor and personal friend of Infantino.
“The report of the supervisory authority to the federal prosecutor’s office contained blacked-out names, which have now been exposed, ” said Blatter.
“Evidence shows that Gianni Infantino’s friend Rinaldo Arnold met with Federal Attorney Michael Lauber.
“The names Platini and Blatter already appeared in the report. Arnold obviously wanted to find out if something was going to happen to the people who might be standing in the way of Infantino’s election as FIFA President.”
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