The president of FIFA, Gianni Infantino, acknowledged that the opening of a criminal proceeding by the Swiss justice for considering his meetings with Michael Lauber irregular when he was Attorney General of Switzerland has affected him “a lot”, and made it clear that he kept these meetings “to finally banish the shadows of the past” over his body.
“We have invested a lot to change FIFA and it is precisely because of all the investment we have made in the new credibility of FIFA, that this has really affected me a lot,” Infantino said this Thursday during his participation in the Swiss Economic Forum held in Montreaux. Swiss justice saw possible indications of criminal conduct in the meetings held by Infantino and LauberAlthough these occurred because the leader wanted “to finally banish the shadows of the past on FIFA because you cannot direct an organization into the future if its past has not been addressed.”
“It was something very clear to me that I had to do everything possible so that FIFA could get back on the right track. Part of that was why I met with the Attorney General and see how we could speed up the ongoing proceedings, some of which are still currently pending. “These meetings with Lauber took place in 2016 and 2017, while Swiss prosecutors They were investigating the alleged corruption of FIFA after the fall of Joseph Blatter, Infantino's predecessor, including how Russia and Qatar had earned the right to host the 2018 and 2022 World Cups.