EFE.- The Federal Criminal Court acquitted this Friday the former presidents of FIFA, Sepp Blatter, and UEFA, Michel Platini, in a corruption trial for a payment of two million Swiss francs (about two million euros at the exchange rate). current) that the first did to the second.
The Prosecutor’s Office had requested twenty months of conditional prison against both, but instead the court agreed to compensation of 20,000 francs for moral damages in favor of Blatter, who led the world soccer organization for 17 years.
The total compensation for the former FIFA manager between 1998 and 2015 rises to about 100,000 Swiss francs if the compensation for the expenses incurred in the process is included.
Platini, former captain and former coach of the French national team, was awarded a total compensation of 142,000 francs, but he waived the part corresponding to non-pecuniary damage.
With this ruling, Platini will now have access to the money that was the subject of the trial and that the Swiss authorities had frozen.
This process has caught the attention of the world of football in the last two weeks and constitutes a great triumph for both figures who have been involved in the different stages of this trial since 2015, which began when the payment of two million francs to Platinum.
The former UEFA president between (2007-2015) was Blatter’s adviser from 1998 to 2002 with a fixed annual salary of 300,000 francs, but according to them only part of the payment had been fulfilled and it was agreed orally (and without witnesses) that the remainder would be paid when FIFA’s finances permitted.
The payment was finally made in 2011, but the Prosecutor’s Office did not accept that version and accused them of fraud and falsification of titles, arguing that FIFA’s financial situation was solvent enough to pay the remuneration offered to Platini in the initial installments.
During the trial, both said they were victims of a plot to prevent the former European soccer leader from being elected to head FIFA, a position that fell in February 2016 to Gianni Infantino, who was his general secretary at UEFA and who chairs the Fifa ever since.
The investigation of this payment coincided with the one known as “FIFA-Gate”, carried out by the United States justice in the spring of 2015 for cases of corruption within FIFA that ended Blatter’s presidency in the body, which he had reached in 1998.
At the end of 2015, the FIFA Ethics Committee itself disqualified Joseph Blatter and Michel Platini for a period of eight years for said subscription, a disqualification that prevented Platini from standing in the presidential elections to relieve Blatter, who resigned for the “FIFA-Gate” scandal in June of that year.
Subsequently, the FIFA Appeal Commission reduced the sanction to both to six years and the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) in May 2016 lowered it to four years.
