I’m a fighter, says defiant Blatter
Fifa’s Sepp Blatter, who is appealing a 90-day suspension from the scandal-tainted world football body, said on Sunday he would fight to defend his reputation.
“I’m a fighter,” he told the Swiss weekly Schweizer am Sonntag. “They can destroy me, but they can’t destroy my life’s work.”
The beleaguered football chief’s lawyers lodged an appeal against his suspension on Friday. At the same time, Blatter asked for further hearings with Fifa’s ethics committee, claiming that he was not allowed to give evidence before he was banned.
But ethics committee spokesman Andreas Bantel said Blatter, 79, had been given the chance to put his case on October 1.
Fifa has been in crisis since May, when US authorities announced charges against 14 officials and sports marketing executives over bribery allegations amounting to more than $150 million.
The president of the European football body Uefa, Michel Platini, was also suspended for 90 days, and has also appealed. Neither Blatter nor Platini are implicated in the wider scandal however.
If their appeals are rejected, they would still have the right to take their cases before the finalinstance Court of Arbritation for Sport, based in Lausanne.
Blatter told Schweizer am Sonntag that as usual he had been in his office at Fifa’s headquarters in Zurich on Saturday morning before leaving to spend the rest of the weekend in his home region of the Valais.
BLATTER’S EX-WIFE DEFENDS HIM Sepp Blatter’s ex-wife has defended the powerful football boss. “Everyone wants to crucify him now,” Graziella BlatterBianca, a former dolphin trainer whose marriage to Blatter ended in 2004 after around a year, told the Tages-Anzeiger newspaper.
“And no one wants to accept any more how much good he has done for soccer, especially for the advancement of women on the pitch as well as in the ranks of officialdom,” she said, insisting her ex-husband was keen to fight corruption in the sport.
She said Blatter, who has denied any wrongdoing, told her he was “OK” when she called him after news broke on Thursday of his provisional suspension, which he is seeking to overturn.
Blatter’s marriage to Graziella, more than a quarter century his junior, was his third.