In a press release published this Tuesday, Michel Platini reveals that he filed a complaint last November with the Paris Public Prosecutor’s Office against Gianni Infantino, current FIFA president, for “active influence peddling.” He also focused on the former director of the legal services of the international organization, Marco Villiger, opening the process for “complicity in active influence peddling.”
This complaint echoes an investigation currently underway in Switzerland, which would allegedly shed light on three secret meetings (without minutes), in 2016 and 2017, between Gianni Infantino and former Swiss Attorney General Michael Lauber, in charge of the investigations in relation to with FIFA between 2015 and 2019.
The former French director was disqualified by the FIFA Ethics Committee, where he served as vice president, in 2015 for a period of eight years, later reduced to six, and was fined 60,000 Swiss francs (55,700 euros) after receiving a commission of almost two million euros as a “bonus” for his position in the body that governs world football. The triple Golden Ball (1983, 84 and 85), suspended in 2015 from all football activity for 6 years (sentence reduced to 4 years by the CAS) by FIFA, has always considered that he was the victim of a plot to remove him from the FIFA presidency, which he was looking for at the time. In 2018, Platini already filed a complaint against Infantino for slanderous complaint and criminal association.