Blatter down to his last challenge
Sepp Blatter will mount his final challenge against a sixyear FIFA ban on Thursday, following more than a year of scandal that saw him thrown out of soccer in disgrace.
The former FIFA boss has appealed to the Court of Arbitration for Sport seeking to overturn a suspension imposed by the sport’s global sanctioning body.
“I’m very confident,” the 80-year-old Blatter said, although his prospects for an outright victory appear to be remote.
The now infamous, endlessly debated case emerged in September of last year, when Swiss prosecutors said they were investigating Blatter over a dubious $2 million payment he authorized in 2011 to his one-time heir apparent, Michel Platini.
Those revelations initially triggered a provisional suspension by FIFA’s ethics committee.
A full investigation and trial by FIFA’s-in-house court found Blatter and Platini both guilty of ethics violations.
They were banned from soccer for eight years in December.
A FIFA appeals committee cut those penalties to six years in February, just before Blatter’s successor and fellow Swiss national, Gianni Infantino, was elected FIFA’s new president.
Blatter’s hopes for redemption at CAS are likely hampered by Platini’s failed appeal at the Lausanne-based court.
In a May ruling, CAS judges said they were “not convinced” the $2 million payment was legitimate.
They did, however, reduce the suspension against the former French star and European soccer boss from six years to four, judging FIFA’s penalty “too severe.”
‘We’re not all liars’
Throughout the protracted saga, both Blatter and Platini have insisted the payment was part of a legitimate oral contract.
Platini was hired by FIFA as a consultant from 1999 to 2002 and had apparently not received his full compensation.
The two men claimed the $2 million was authorized in 2011 as an honest effort to settle that account.
Judges at FIFA and CAS have so far found that argument unpersuasive.
Blatter has maintained his innocence as his four-decade FIFA career unraveled over the past 13 months.
“FIFA made the contract with Platini, and this was an oral contract,” he said in Zurich.
“So far in the FIFA committees, in the ethics committee and in the appeal committee, they were saying, ‘We don’t believe that. But we are not all liars. I think there is a good chance that this panel will believe there was a contract.”
Arguments at CAS are expected to last just one day, although a decision might take several weeks.
The hearing marks the latest legal battle in a series of intertwined scandals that began in May of last year when the US Justice Department unsealed a raft of corruption indictments against top FIFA officials, culminating in a Zurich raid that resulted in multiple arrests.