Fifa: Michel Platini and Sepp Blatter appear in Switzerland for fraud

Published on: 08/06/2022 – 09:11 From Wednesday until June 22, Michel Platini and the ex-president of Fifa Sepp Blatter appear in Switzerland for “fraud”. At the center of the case: a suspicious payment which has placed them since 2015 on the ban of world football. Michel Platini and the ex-president of Fifa Sepp Blatter appear from Wednesday June 8, in Switzerland, in the case of suspicious payment which broke their career in 2015. The epilogue of six years of investigation crossed by suspicions of conspiracy. From 9 a.m. local time, and until June 22, the Federal Criminal Court of Bellinzona will judge the 66-year-old Frenchman and the 86-year-old Swiss for “fraud”, “unfair management”, “abuse of confidence” and “false in the titles”, before rendering its decision on July 8. The magistrates will have to navigate between eras, from the birth, in 1998, of the Platini-Blatter alliance to their growing rivalry and then their joint ejection from world football, but also to distinguish the purely judicial dimension of the case from its political background. The prosecution accuses the two former leaders of having “illegally obtained, to the detriment of Fifa, a payment of 2 million Swiss francs ” (1.8 million euros) “in favor of Michel Pla tini”. Both targeted by other procedures, in France for the triple Ballon d’Or (about the awarding of the 2022 World Cup to Qatar) and in Switzerland for Sepp Blatter, they incur five years of imprisonment or a fine. Pariahs of football The two accused will be able to explain themselves in the affair which made them pariahs of football, at the very moment when Michel Platini, then boss of UEFA and still crowned with his sporting glory, seemed ideally placed to take the helm of Fifa after the scandals that had pushed Blatter to resign. Defense and prosecution agree on one point: the Frenchman advised Sepp Blatter well between 1998 and 2002, during the first mandate of the latter at the head of Fifa, and the two men signed a contract in 1999 agreeing to an annual remuneration of 300,000 Swiss francs, entirely paid by Fifa. But in January 2011, “more than eight years after the end of his activity as an adviser”, the ex-captain of the Blues “fa it is worth a claim of 2 million Swiss francs”, paid by the football body “with the help” of Sepp Blatter, notes the prosecution. For the prosecution, it is a “baseless” payment, obtained by “artfully misleading” the internal controls of Fifa by false assertions of the two leaders, the key criterion of the scam. two men hammer on their side that they had from the beginning decided on an annual salary of one million Swiss francs, orally and without witnesses, without the finances of Fifa allowing the immediate payment to Michel Platini .The shadow of Gianni Infantino”This is a balance of salary, owed by Fifa, by oral contract and paid under conditions of the most perfect legality. Nothing else! I acted, like any my life and my whole career, with the greatest honesty”, assures the Frenchman in statements sent to AFP. Platini also considers himself the victim of a plot to block his path to the presidency of Fifa and denounces in particular the murky role of current world football boss elected in 2016, Gianni Infant ino, in triggering the investigation. Former right-hand man of the French at UEFA, the Italian-Swiss has been targeted since 2020 by a procedure relating to three secret meetings with the former chief of the prosecution, in which a magistrate and the ex-legal director of Fifa come to be charged. But Swiss justice having so far refused to join the two files, the debates should quickly refocus on the reality of the oral agreement of the two accused: they will have to explain the contradiction with the 1999 contract, the fact that this debt has never been provisioned by Fifa, and the contrast with the usual practices of the body, which has never paid an employee or consultant “without a written basis”, assured his former HRD in the section disciplinary proceedings.As a civil party, Fifa intends to be reimbursed for the salary and social charges paid in 2011, “so that the money embezzled by the defendants for personal purposes is returned to the one and only purpose for which it was intended: football “, indicated to AFP Me Hohl-Chirazi, lawyer of the instance. With AFP