By Andrew Warshaw
October 19 – For the first time since being sensationally suspended by FIFA’s ethics committee, beleaguered UEFA president Michel Platini has gone public by admitting he had no written contract over the infamous SFr2 million payment he received from FIFA in 2011 but has issued a staunch defence of his reputation and conduct.
Four days after his lawyer addressed UEFA’s 54 member nations to try and keep them on-side yet swore them to confidentiality, Platini himself has come out fighting though now risks further ethics sanctions.
The Frenchman, whose bid for the FIFA presidency has been wrecked by being suspended pending the outcome of a full investigation, told the French daily newspaper Le Monde in a no-holds-barred interview that the so-called “disloyal payment” made for work advising FIFA President Sepp Blatter from 1998-2002 was “man to man” and that he believed that under Swiss law “an oral contract is worth a written contract.”
On Friday, Blatter, also suspended, told a Swiss broadcaster virtually the same thing, that the deal was a “gentlemen’s agreement.” Both are appealing against their respective 90-day suspensions.
Platini, who like Blatter will be conspicuous by his absence at tomorrow’s emergency FIFA executive committee meeting in Zurich, also told Le Monde he couldn’t believe he was being tarnished with the same brush as other miscreants.
“I was suspended for three months, but what annoys me the most is to be put in the same bag as the others. I find it shameful to be dragged through the mud like this. I don’t want to be in the position of Mohamed Bin Hammam who was suspended just before the elections in 2011 and cleared only after Blatter had been re-elected.”
Bin Hammam was later banned for life for abuse of Asian confederation funds but Platini is determined not to go the same way in his determination to succeed Blatter.
“My lawyers are following FIFA procedures and will go to the Court of Arbitration for Sport if necessary.”
Neither Blatter nor Platini has fully explained the reasons for the nine-year delay between the work carried out and the money being paid. But Platini provided Le Monde with hitherto unpublished details of precisely when and how the payment, made shortly before Blatter was elected FIFA president for the fourth time, was first negotiated.
“In 1998, I was president of the organising committee of the World Cup in France when a new FIFA president was due to be elected. I was in Singapore and Blatter [then FIFA general secretary and a presidential candidate] asked me to see him in his room,” Platini related.
“He immediately challenged me: ‘Are we going for it or not?’ He told me that [outgoing president] Joao Havelange had said: ‘Blatter and Platini as president and secretary-general is a very elegant solution.’ I was fully involved with the World Cup and said it did not interest me.”
Two months later, after deciding to go for the presidency himself, Blatter apparently asked Platini to become his special advisor and asked him how much he wanted to be paid.
“I said ‘a million’. ‘A million what?’ ‘Whatever you want: roubles, pounds, dollars…remember this was before the Euro. ‘ He said, ‘OK, 1m Swiss francs a year.’ Incredible though it may sound, that’s what happened.”
Platini told Le Monde that the final SFr2 million payment was delayed for so long because it wasn’t correct for him to receive such a large sum in just one or two transactions while FIFA’s secretary-general (at the time Michel zen Ruffinen) only earned SFr300,000. As a result, Platini says he was told he would be paid in instalments with the balance to come later. “Only later never came.”
“It’s never been about money for me,” insisted Platini. “I was an unpaid chairman of the World Cup organising committee. Before that, I turned down the opportunity to go to Real Madrid even though they had handed me a cheque and told me to add as many zeros as I liked. When I said to Blatter ‘a million of whatever you want’, I was leaving it up to him to decide how much he wanted to give me.”
Platini suggested in the interview that Blatter, with whom he has fallen out after a once close professional relationship, was out to get him but said he still fondly remembered the good times.
“He has a lot of charm and I can say that I was somehow bewitched. Even if he wants to kill me politically, I still have a little affection for what we experienced together.”
The 90-day suspension can also be extended by a further 45 days, taking it up until just six days before the FIFA presidential election on February 26. Platini maintains he alone is capable of reforming the organisation.
“I am the only one who can ensure that FIFA again becomes the home of football,” he said. “But, whenever I approach the sun, like Icarus, it burns everywhere.”
Platini, who has been president of UEFA since 2007, was favourite to replace 79-year-old Blatter before becoming embroiled in the biggest corruption scandal in sporting history. When he submitted his official candidacy shortly before being suspended, it is rumoured he indicated more than 100 federations backed him.
“I don’t think I have lost many votes with these scandals,” he told le Monde. “People who know me know that I can look myself in the mirror.”
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