New York jury acquits former Peru soccer boss

NEW YORK: A US jury acquitted a “thrilled” Peruvian former soccer boss at the FIFA corruption trial on Tuesday, clearing him to jet home while two convicted co-defendants await sentencing from behind bars.

The panel cleared 60-year-old Manuel Burga, a former head of Peru’s soccer federation and ex-FIFA development committee member, on one count of racketeering conspiracy on the seventh day of deliberations in New York.

The jury returned the verdict following the Christmas holiday after convicting Jose Maria Marin, former head of Brazil’s Football Confederation and Juan Angel Napout, former head of Paraguayan football on Friday. They were previously deadlocked on Burga.

The Peruvian was arrested in 2015, when the United States unveiled the largest graft scandal in world soccer, indicting 42 officials and marketing executives, as well as the sports company Traffic, with corruption crimes totaling more than $200 million.

But more than two and a half years later, a bribery trial opened in a Brooklyn federal court with only three defendants in the dock -- one of whom now walks free.

While the trial exposed systemic corruption at the heart of the world’s most popular sport, US federal prosecutors’ case against Burga collapsed.

Prosecutors themselves conceded that he never received bribery money, despite contending he agreed to. Extradited to the United States from Peru in 2016, he is now due to be reunited with his family in Lima on Wednesday. - AFP