On Wednesday evening, the ethics committee of the world football association announced that it had conducted and closed a preliminary investigation against President Gianni Infantino. Fifa chief investigator Claudia Rojas, an administrative lawyer from Colombia, who was brought into office overnight by Infantino in June 2017, let it be known via Fifa press release that she had “after examining the relevant documents and evidence” decided to allow the proceedings “because of a lack of credible evidence to stop all alleged violations of the Fifa Code of Ethics “.
Spontaneously, the Swiss criminal law professor Mark Pieth summed up the impression of independent observers: “It is a good thing, because a first step was that a preliminary investigation was opened. It was to be expected that it would be stopped immediately.” Rojas is now risking her “reputation” if the Swiss criminal justice system continues its investigation.
Since the end of July, the special prosecutor Stefan Keller has been investigating all kinds of silent meetings between Infantino and the Bernese federal prosecutor Michael Lauber in 2016 and 2017. They took place outside the authority and were never recorded; Everyone involved wants to have forgotten the last date. The suspicion of violation of official secrets and incitement to do so is now being investigated. The Swiss Federal Administrative Court has already ruled far-reaching in a ruling: The meeting participants plagued by collective partial amnesia, in addition to Lauber and Infantino at least two other people with memory loss, had agreed to lie here.
Nothing is worthy of punishment, no violation recognizable
The fact that Rojas, as the Fifa text claims, has “carefully examined” the documents available is viewed by independent observers as a joke for good reasons. On the one hand there is the technical question: Hundreds of pages of legal writings, all in German – how does she have managed that in such a short time? Has everything been translated into Spanish, or was the content simply interpreted by third parties – possibly by lawyers paid for by FIFA? There is nothing illuminating in this respect from Rojas’ Fifa text.
This makes the following statement all the more original: Rojas was able to see, among other things, special investigators Keller’s opening decision. And thereupon the administrative lawyer from Cali “decided to discontinue the proceedings due to a lack of credible evidence of all alleged violations of the Fifa code of ethics”. Nothing is worthy of punishment, no violation recognizable. This is funny because FIFA and its lawyers have been complaining for weeks that they have no idea what exactly Keller is accusing Infantino of.
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