FIFA President Gianni Infantino is at least not sanctioned by the ethics committee of the World Football Association because of the secret meeting with the Swiss federal prosecutor Michael Lauber. As Fifa announced, the chairman of the investigative chamber, María Claudia Rojas, initiated a preliminary investigation against the 50-year-old in May 2020. “After examining the relevant documents and evidence” it was decided to “discontinue the proceedings due to a lack of credible evidence of all alleged violations of the Fifa code of ethics”.
The Swiss public prosecutor’s office opened criminal proceedings against Infantino at the end of July. It is about three meetings with Lauber, who will leave his post at the end of August. The accusation is, among other things, incitement to abuse of office. Infantino rejects this and has since repeatedly assured that it will cooperate fully with the authorities. “During these meetings, nothing even remotely illegal happened, or the opportunity to do so would have arisen,” Infantino said last. “The very thought that this might have been the case is absurd.”
At the time of the meeting with Lauber, Fifa was still in the process of coming to terms with the scandal around ex-President Joseph Blatter. However, there were also allegations against Infantino from his time as Uefa general secretary that occupy the Swiss judiciary. At the beginning of August, a spokesman for FIFA told SPIEGEL that the world association wanted to hold on to Infantino despite the investigation.
Mild reaction than in Blatter’s time
Blatter and Michel Platini, the then head of the European football association Uefa, were banned from the ethics committee for 90 days in 2015. Articles 83, 84 and 85 of Fifa’s ethical code provide for this possibility of a sanction in the event of violations or suspicions, but in the case of Infantino, Fifa apparently did not see the need to exist.
According to a Fifa announcement, Infantino was also reported to the ethics committee on June 21. “The sources in question relate to various alleged violations of the Fifa code of ethics, in particular the booking of a private flight from Suriname to Geneva and meetings between the Fifa President and the Swiss Federal Prosecutor Michael Lauber,” said the world association.
