Sepp Blatter and Michel Platini acquitted again at second trial of financial wrongdoing at FIFA


MUTTENZ, Switzerland — Sepp Blatter and Michel Platini won again in court Tuesday and now lead 2-0 in trial verdicts against Swiss federal prosecutors.

The former FIFA president and former UEFA president were acquitted for a second time on charges of fraud, forgery, mismanagement and misappropriation of more than $2 million of FIFA money in 2011.

Blatter, now aged 89, gave little reaction listening to the verdict of three cantonal (state) judges acting as a federal criminal appeals court. Sitting in the row in front of Platini, Blatter alternately tapped his fingers on his desk or held his left hand over his mouth.

Platini sat with his arms folded or rubbing his hands as he listened to a translator sitting beside him relating the court’s verdict in German into his native French.

The attorney general’s office in Switzerland had challenged a first acquittal in July 2022 and asked for sentences of 20 months, suspended for two years. The indictment alleged the payment “damaged FIFA’s assets and unlawfully enriched Platini.”

“Michel Platini must finally be left in peace in criminal matters,” his lawyer Dominic Nellen said in a statement. ”After two acquittals, even the Office of the Attorney General of Switzerland must realize that these criminal proceedings have definitively failed.”

A further appeal to the Swiss supreme court can be filed by prosecutors.

Blatter and Platini have consistently denied wrongdoing in a decade-long case that swung on their claims of a verbal agreement to one day settle the money in question.

Blatter approved FIFA paying 2 million Swiss francs (now $2.21 million) to France soccer great Platini in February 2011 for supplementary and non-contracted salary working as a presidential advisor from 1998-2002.

The latest win for Blatter and the 69-year-old Platini came exactly 9½ years since the Swiss federal investigation was revealed and kicked off events that ended the careers of soccer’s most powerful men.

That September 2015 day in Zurich, police came to interrogate them at FIFA after an executive committee meeting when Platini was a strong favorite to succeed his one-time mentor in an upcoming election.

Though federal court trials have twice cleared their names, Blatter’s reputation likely always will be tied to leading FIFA during corruption crises that took down a swath of senior soccer officials worldwide.

Platini, one of soccer’s greatest players and later Blatter’s protégé in soccer politics, never did get the FIFA presidency he often called his destiny.

Neither Blatter nor Platini has worked in soccer since they were suspended by the FIFA ethics committee in October 2015. They were later banned and failed to overturn the bans in separate appeals to the Court of Arbitration for Sport in 2016.

”The criminal proceedings have had not only legal but also massive personal and professional consequences for Michel Platini, although no incriminating evidence was ever presented,” Nellen said, suggesting further legal action “against those responsible for the criminal proceedings.”

Platini’s ban expired in 2019 and Blatter was given a subsequent ban by FIFA in 2021 months before his first was due to end.

Blatter is exiled from soccer until late in 2028 — when he will be 92 — because of an ethics prosecution of alleged self-dealing in eight-figure management bonuses paid for successfully organizing the men’s World Cup in 2010 and 2014.

The verdict was given Tuesday in a low-key provincial courthouse where a four-day trial was held three weeks ago.

Blatter and Platini have claimed at five different judicial bodies — twice at FIFA, then the Court of Arbitration for Sport and now two Swiss federal criminal courts — that they had a verbal “gentleman’s agreement” to one day settle the unpaid and non-contracted salary.

Platini was a storied former captain and coach of the France national term when he worked to help Blatter get elected to lead FIFA in Paris on the eve of the 1998 World Cup he organized.

The two men said Platini agreed to be a presidential adviser on an annual salary of 300,000 Swiss francs (now $340,000) through 2002. They claim there was a verbal deal to later get the balance of 1 million Swiss francs for each year that FIFA could not pay at the time.

Platini started asking for the money early in 2010, citing seven-figure payments made to senior Blatter aides who left FIFA which showed the soccer body could afford to pay him. The payment was finally made in February 2011.

Details of the payment only emerged in the crisis that hit FIFA in May 2015 when U.S. federal investigators unsealed a sweeping investigation of international soccer officials. Swiss authorities made early-morning arrests at hotels in Zurich before seizing FIFA financial and business records.

In 2015, Swiss federal prosecutors already were handling a criminal complaint filed by FIFA. That was about suspected financial wrongdoing linked to votes in December 2010 that picked Russia and Qatar as future World Cup hosts.

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AP soccer: https://apnews.com/hub/soccer



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