By Andrew Warshaw
April 28 – FIFA president Gianni Infantino is once again facing allegations of wrongdoing in his dealings with Switzerland’s under-fire attorney general Michael Lauber over a tv rights contract he handled when he worked as UEFA’s legal affairs director.
The Tribune de Geneve newspaper claims Infantino is suspected of having intervened with Lauber, shortly after he was elected FIFA boss in succession to Sepp Blatter, to get an investigation dropped about his awarding of the contract in question.
The paper says it has supporting documentation that shows Infantino met with Lauber in 2016 to “get rid of an investigation that threatened him personally”.
Until recently, Lauber who led the Swiss side of the FIFAgate scandal, had been investigating several cases of suspected corruption dating back to 2014.
Last month, however, Lauber, who has denied any wrongdoing, was sanctioned for disloyalty, lying and breaching his office’s code of conduct. He also had his pay cut for a year after a watchdog found he repeatedly told falsehoods and broke a prosecutors’ code of conduct.
According to the Tribune de Geneve, Infantino was “worried” about a specific investigation and wrote to his childhood friend, Rinaldo Arnold, who had become a senior prosecutor in Switzerland’s Haut-Valais region where they grew up together.
“I will try to explain to the OAG (attorney general’s office) that it is in my interests that everything should be cleared up as soon as possible, that it be clearly stated that I have nothing to do with this matter,” Infantino wrote in an email quoted by the newspaper.
Arnold, who had helped to set up a first meeting between Infantino and Lauber, allegedly replied: “What is important is the meeting in two weeks’ time. If you like, I can come with you again.”
That meeting took place on April 22, 2016, the newspaper said, adding that what happened during it remains “a mystery”, and the OAG “refuses to speak about it”.
The contract in question first emerged in files released as part of the Panama Papers offshore tax haven affair four years ago which laid bare the activities of the rich and powerful. According to the Tribune de Geneve, criminal proceedings were opened in April, 2016, against an unknown person on suspicion of “unfair management” and “breach of trust” by the Public Ministry of the Swiss Confederation (MPC) following the revelations.
According to the Panama Papers file, the contract was signed off in 2006 to Argentine father and son Hugo and Mariano Jinkis who bought TV rights for the Champions League to be shown in Ecuador and then are reported to have immediately sold them on for almost three times the price. The father and son TV rights dealers are among those indicted in the US in the FIFAgate scandal.
FIFA has responded to the Tribune de Geneve story by telling agencies “the email referred to in the article was obviously obtained by hacking, which is an illegal and criminal act.”
It added the article was “completely taken out of context with the sole objective of misleading the reader”.
“Not only Mr Infantino had no reason to lie in that email, the email never said Mr Infantino wanted to ‘clear his name’,” FIFA added.
But the Tribune de Geneve suggests that between July and September 2016, there were more than 20 calls between Swiss prosecutors and FIFA lawyers.
“Prosecutors have apparently helped FIFA formulate its requests” as a plaintiff so that they could be “accepted by the OAG” – an attitude which “seems incompatible with the OAG’s duty of impartiality”, the paper said.
In November 2017, “after a third informal meeting” between Infantino and Lauber, the OAG reportedly closed the investigation into the contract.
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