Blatter and Platini, accused of fraud by the Swiss Prosecutor’s Office

The Swiss Prosecutor’s Office has accused former FIFA president Joseph Blatter and former UEFA president Michel Platini of fraud and other crimes, for a payment of close to two million euros that the former made to the latter in 2011 for advisory work carried out between 1998 and 2002.

In a statement, the Swiss Prosecutor’s Office indicated on Tuesday that “the evidence gathered has confirmed that this payment was made without legal basis, damaged FIFA’s assets and illicitly enriched Platini,” so both will be tried within a few months.

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The investigation into these events began in 2015 and since then Blatter, 85, and Platini, 66, have denied having committed any type of infraction and have referred to a verbal agreement between them for this payment.

The accusations for both

Both gave testimony in Switzerland last summer and, according to the Public Prosecutor’s Office, Blatter has been accused of fraud, mismanagement, embezzlement of FIFA funds and falsification of a document.

Fraud, misappropriation, forgery and complicity are the accusations made against Platini by the Swiss Public Prosecutor’s Office, charges that can be punished with prison terms.

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 and that ended the presidency of Blatter in the body , which had arrived in 1998.

They have already been suspended by FIFA

At the end of that year, the FIFA Ethics Committee itself disqualified Joseph Blatter and Michel Platini for a period of eight years for this payment, a disqualification that prevented Platini from standing in the presidential elections to relieve Blatter in which he was elected its current president, Gianni Infantino, then UEFA general secretary.

Subsequently, the FIFA Appeal Committee reduced the sanction for both to six years and the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) in May 2016 lowered it to four years.