Sepp Blatter, former president of global soccer’s governing body FIFA, and Michel Platini, former UEFA president, have both been acquitted of corruption charges for a second time by a Swiss federal criminal appeals court.
They have been formally acquitted of charges of fraud, forgery, and mismanagement and appropriation of $2.2 million from FIFA in 2011.
An initial acquittal issued in July 2022 was challenged by the Swiss attorney general’s office, which asked for sentences of 20 months each for the former FIFA and UEFA presidents. The first indictments over the issue, meanwhile, stretch back to November 2021.
The case revolved around a payment made by FIFA to Platini in 2011 relating to the latter’s time as a presidential advisor to Blatter between 1998 and 2002. Because there was no written contract made at that time between the pair, the Swiss authorities had accused FIFA and Blatter of making the payment “without a legal basis.”
Both Blatter and Platini have always maintained the payment came because of a verbal agreement between the pair, through which Platini simply received backdated consultancy fee which FIFA could not afford to issue during the period in which it was earned.
Now, the appeals court has once again accepted Blatter and Platini’s explanation, although prosecutors can still file an appeal with the Swiss Supreme Court.
Both Blatter and Platini were banned from soccer for eight years, which was later reduced by FIFA’s ethics committee following the exposure of the FIFA corruption scandal in 2015, with Blatter, now 89, losing the FIFA presidency and Platini also being removed from heading up UEFA.
Before that dramatic loss of power, Platini (now 69) was considered the front-runner in terms of which candidate would replace Blatter at the 2016 FIFA presidential elections. Instead, Gianni Infantino, UEFA’s secretary general at the time, was elected to that position, which he still holds.
Dominic Nellen, Platini’s lawyer, said, following the acquittal: “After two acquittals, even the office of the attorney general of Switzerland must realize that these criminal proceedings have definitively failed.
“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 has previously suggested that the whole trial has been an attempt to stop Platini from succeeding Blatter in the FIFA presidency.
He said: “Platini was the most likely successor to Blatter in 2015, but someone wanted him out of the way. At every turn there seems to be an attempt to stop Platini becoming president of FIFA.”
