Gianni Infantino, FIFA President, after Spain’s victory in the Women’s World Cup final, in Sydney (Australia), August 20, 2023. ASANKA BRENDON RATNAYAKE / REUTERS
With a few exceptions, Swiss justice has filed criminal proceedings, opened since 2015, one after the other, in the context of “FIFAgate”, this myriad of political-financial scandals linked to the International Football Federation. Latest example to date: the investigation opened, in July 2020, against the president of the body, Gianni Infantino, and the former Swiss attorney general Michael Lauber, was closed, Wednesday October 19, by extraordinary prosecutors Ulrich Weder and Hans Maurer. This abandonment of the proceedings, notified in a dismissal order, constitutes a victory for Mr. Infantino, already expressly cleared in this case by the FIFA ethics committee in August 2020.
Read also: The indictment of prosecutor Michael Lauber reshuffles the “FIFAgate” cards
The magistrates assure that they do not have “list of clues allowing us to conclude that the public prosecutor of the Confederation was being exploited [MPC] by Mr. Infantino or FIFA. » “The investigations carried out did not substantiate the above suspicions. On the contrary, they weakened them”, declare MM. Weder and Maurer, based on the hearings of the defendants, “many witnesses” et “analysis of electronic data (diaries, emails)”.
Until the proceedings were closed, the boss of world football was being prosecuted for “incitement to abuse of authority, violation of official secrecy and obstruction of criminal action” due to his secret meetings – without supporting minutes – in 2016 and 2017 with Mr. Lauber, who was responsible for investigations related to FIFA between 2015 and 2019.
Prosecutors have decided to clear the seven defendants in this case. Also prosecuted: Mr. Lauber’s former spokesperson, André Marty; a childhood friend of Mr. Infantino, the first prosecutor of Haut-Valais, Rinaldo Arnold; the former legal director of FIFA, Marco Villiger; anti-corruption prosecutor Cédric Remund; and former federal prosecutor Olivier Thormann.
A third mysterious encounter
Against a backdrop of suspicions of collusion between FIFA and the MPC, this affair, partly revealed by the “Football Leaks” in 2018, poisoned the reign of Mr. Infantino, 53 years old. Particularly publicized, it led to the resignation, in July 2020, of Mr. Lauber, sanctioned at the end of a disciplinary investigation carried out by the Supervisory Authority of the Public Prosecutor’s Office of the Confederation (AS-MPC). The Federal Administrative Court (TAF) concluded, in the summer of 2020, that “the Attorney General deliberately hid the truth from the AS-MPC during his hearing on November 12, 2018, and that he consciously hid the third meeting with the FIFA President.”
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2023-10-26 12:30:08
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