Like his co-accused, former Fifa number 2 Jérôme Valcke, the president of PSG and BeIN Media Nasser Al-Khelaïfi was definitively acquitted by the Federal Court of Lausanne, in the case of the allocation of TV rights for the 2026 and 2030 World Cups.
Good news for Nasser Al-Khelaïfi. The president of beIN Media and PSG was definitively acquitted on Friday by the Federal Court in Lausanne (Switzerland), as he had already been at first instance and on appeal, in a TV rights case.
His co-accused, former Fifa number 2 Jérôme Valcke, was also acquitted in the same case, but also definitively sentenced to eleven months’ suspended prison sentence for “passive corruption” and “forgery in securities” in a separate case, which also earned Greek businessman Dinos Deris a ten-month suspended prison sentence.
“It’s a full rehabilitation,” say NAK’s lawyers
“The judgment of the Federal Court definitively confirms the total and unreserved acquittal of our client, Nasser Al-Khelaïfi. For the third and final time, not the slightest offense has been upheld: it is a full rehabilitation,” rejoiced Marc Bonnant, Grégoire Mangeat and Fanny Margairaz, his Swiss lawyers, in a press release.
In the section concerning the president of PSG, by far the most publicized of the two cases, the prosecution considered that Mr. Valcke had monetized his support for the channel beIN, for the allocation of TV rights for the 2026 and 2030 World Cups, in exchange for the exclusive use of a luxurious villa on the Sardinian Emerald Coast.
This “Villa Bianca” was purchased for five million euros by a company briefly owned by Mr. Al-Khelaïfi, a few months before the signing in April 2014 of a contract between beIN and the world football body relating to the rights in North Africa and the Middle East for the two competitions.
