By Matt Scott
October 29 – Michel Platini has hit back at the suspension that risks ending his ambitions of becoming the next FIFA president.
In an interview with the Daily Telegraph, Platini drags the FIFA finance director – now its acting general secretary – Markus Kattner into the crisis for the first time.
The UEFA president insisted that the CHF2 million (£1.35m, €1.84m) cheque he received in 2011, the payment that led to FIFA’s ethics committee handing him and Sepp Blatter provisional 90-day suspensions this month, was signed by Kattner’s hand.
“In the end the organisation that validated and proceeded with the payment suspended me four years later,” he said.
It is the first time Platini has given his side of the story in one of the biggest scandals ever to hit football. But the details he provides are intriguing, insisting everything came through normal FIFA procedures – not a so-called “black-box” account – and was also signed off by both the Finance and Audit Committees.
He said: “I was always assured that the payment had followed internal-compliance rules at FIFA. The finance director, [Markus] Kattner, made the payment on the basis of a proper invoice.
“People have recently been bringing up that my debt wasn’t detailed in the FIFA accounts. It was put before two specialist committees on the subject and was quite obviously reviewed by the statutory auditor. I was neither a member of the Finance Committee nor the Audit Committee.
“The two million represents the equivalent of four years’ salary arrears that FIFA owed me when I was the president’s special adviser. The president himself offered me a contract and a salary that I accepted.
“So to be clear: was there work provided? Yes. Is an oral contract legal in Switzerland? Yes. Did I have the right to reclaim my money even nine years later? Yes. Did I produce a proper invoice as FIFA required? Yes. Was the money declared to the taxman? Yes.
“My approach has been totally transparent. I informed the people concerned at UEFA who took it up with the finance department at FIFA. My invoice was then paid up from a standard FIFA account.
“Where is the secret account in all this? Do you know many people who get their money from a so-called black-box account who pay their National Insurance on that money and then declare it to the taxman?”
After yesterday’s venomous interview from Sepp Blatter towards him to the Russian news agency, Tass, Platini admitted his once-warm relationship with the outgoing FIFA president has been damaged in recent years.
“FIFA and UEFA are antagonistic in an organic sense,” he said. “At one time or another there have quite obviously been frictions, tensions, and a rivalry has developed. The next FIFA president will have to bring unity and harmony back to the two organisations.
“With Sepp Blatter our relationship became still more strained when in 2015, going against the promise he made in 2015, he wanted to put himself forward for re-election.”
However despite his current travails, the Frenchman is clear he still intends to claim the FIFA presidency in the elections next February.
“People want to prevent me running because they know that I have every chance of winning. I have the impression they don’t want a former player running FIFA as they don’t want to put football in footballers’ hands.
“But I am the only one who has a 360-degree view of football. I have been a player, a coach of the French national team, a director of a club with Nancy, an organiser of a World Cup [in France 98] and, right now, the boss of the most powerful Confederation, a journey I have achieved with honesty.
“My record running UEFA is pretty clear, with the Champions League being opened up to minor nations and how the implementation of Financial Fair Play has already brought professional clubs’ debts down significantly.
“I know all the families of football, all the sensitivities and the preoccupations of each one. I am, in all humility, the most able to run world football.”
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