ZÜRICH,
Switzerland
Former FIFA President Sepp Blatter and former UEFA chief Michel Platini were both acquitted of corruption charges by a Swiss court on Tuesday.
The charges had related to
fraud, forgery, mismanagement and misappropriation of 2 million Swiss francs
(now €2.1 million; $2.26 million) of FIFA money in 2011.
The two had previously
been acquitted
by a lower court in 2022, but Swiss prosecutors appealed
that decision.
"After two acquittals,
even the Office of the Attorney General of Switzerland must realize that these
criminal proceedings have definitively failed," Platini's lawyer
Dominic Nellen said in a statement on Tuesday. "Michel Platini must
finally be left in peace in criminal matters."
The corruption case related to
payment of 2 million Swiss francs that Blatter authorized to Platini — a
former French soccer
star and former captain of the national team — in 2011.
The two men said the payment
was a consultancy fee paid to Platini for work carried out between 1998 and
2002.
They said the payment had been
partly deferred because FIFA lacked the funds to pay Platini in full at the
time. They also said the agreement was made orally and with no witnesses.
Platini claimed the debt in
2011. Prosecutors later argued that this was an "unfounded" payment
obtained by "cleverly misleading" FIFA's internal controls through
false statements.
The scandal was made public in
2015, forcing Blatter to step
down as FIFA president — a role he had held since 1998. It
also prompted Michel to quit
as UEFA president, and scuttled his prospects of succeeding Blatter in
FIFA.
Blatter, who is now 89, and
Platini, 69, have consistently denied wrongdoing in a decade-long corruption
case.
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