By Andrew Warshaw
September 25 – FIFA has agreed to give Swiss investigators access to the email accounts of the organisation’s suspended general secretary Jerome Valcke.
Valcke, conspicuous by his absence at this week’s executive committee meeting, was relieved of his duties last week after being implicated in an alleged scheme, apparently via email exchanges, to sell World Cup tickets for above face value. He has described allegations as “fabricated and outrageous”.
Swiss investigators already looking into FIFA’s activities had asked to examine Valcke’s emails. Those since May 2015 have now been handed over, according to attorney general Michael Lauber’s office (OAG), with older emails to follow.
It is understood Valcke’s FIFA and Google email accounts were used to discuss the proposed deal for black market 2014 World Cup tickets, made public last week in documents presented by a Israeli-American ticketing consultant whose company had dealings with FIFA.
Initially FIFA only agreed to co-operate with the request to unblock Valcke’s emails if “several conditions will be fulfilled” , according to Lauber’s office, but subsequently relented.
“FIFA informed the Office of the Attorney General of Switzerland (OAG) to unseal all email accounts belonging to Mr. Jerome Valcke, suspended Secretary-General,” the federal prosecutor’s office said in a statement. “Furthermore, the OAG is pleased to note that FIFA has handed over on its own initiative Mr. Jerome Valcke’s emails since May 2015.”
Lauber revealed last week his department had conducted apartment searches in the Swiss Alps that may have been used to launder money.
Meanwhile, ahead of an eagerly anticipated post-executive committee press conference at which he is expected to make a rare appearance since the ongoing US and Swiss anti-corruption probes intensified, Blatter urged his colleagues to co-operate with both sets of authorities.
Writing in his weekly column for FIFA’s in-house magazine, he said: “We should co-operate, no matter how close to home those investigations get. This is the difficult path we must follow if we are serious about change. We need to show that we understand the severity of this situation and that we are ready to take the right steps to fix it.”
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