A small air of score settling will float over Bellinzona, near the Italian-Swiss border. The Swiss resort, best known for its three castles, will host one of the most anticipated matches in the world of football for several years: the one that opposes justice to Sepp Blatter and Michel Platini. The ex-FIFA president and ex-UEFA boss, once allied with world football bosses, have become rivals as the former midfielder’s appetite has grown.
Here they are summoned to explain themselves together before the Federal Criminal Court, tried for fraud in the case of a suspicious payment to Michel Platini, which broke out in 2015 and whose trial opens this Wednesday. At the time, the former French international, crowned with his sporting glory and powerful leader, was the natural favorite to succeed Blatter, aged and entangled in several scandals. But the Swiss finally dragged “Platoche” in his fall, with this story of “payment of 2 million Swiss francs” in favor of the French, and “to the detriment of FIFA”.
An obscure oral agreement
Defense and prosecution agree on one point: the Frenchman advised Sepp Blatter well between 1998 and 2002, during the latter’s first term as head of FIFA, and the two men signed a contract in 1999 agreeing to a annual remuneration of 300,000 Swiss francs, “fully paid by FIFA”, according to the prosecution. But in January 2011, “more than eight years after the end of his activity as an adviser”, the ex-captain of the Blues “claimed a claim of 2 million Swiss francs”, paid by the football authority “with the competition” by Sepp Blatter.
For the prosecution, it is an “unfounded” payment, obtained by “cleverly misleading” FIFA’s internal controls by false assertions by the two leaders, the key criterion of the scam. The two men insist on their side that they had from the start decided on an annual salary of one million Swiss francs, orally and without witnesses, without the finances of FIFA allowing immediate payment to Michel. Platinum. “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 all my life and all my career, with the greatest honesty, ”assures the Frenchman.
Infantino, the man in the shadows
But what value should be given to this oral agreement, assuming that it was pronounced? The two defendants, allies of circumstance, 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 does not has never paid an employee or consultant “without a written basis”, assured his former HRD in the disciplinary part of the procedure.
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”, indicates Me Hohl-Chirazi, litigation lawyer. And it is not the shadow of the third man of sports-judicial thriller, the current FIFA President Gianni Infantino, who should disturb the debates. The two accused point to a possible role of the former right-hand man of the French, elected following their forfeiture in 2016, in the outbreak of the case. But the Swiss justice refused to link the case of the payment to Platini to the procedure relating to secret meetings between Infantino and the former chief prosecutor.
Both targeted by other procedures, in France for the triple Ballon d’Or and in Switzerland for Sepp Blatter, they risk five years’ imprisonment or a fine. They will also be tried until June 22 for “unfair management”, “breach of trust” and “false titles” in the same case. The court is due to render its decision on July 8.