Ex-official commits suicide

BUENOS AIRES: A former Argentine football official committed suicide on Tuesday, the same day he was accused of bribe-taking in the Fifa corruption trial that opened in New York this week, Argentine media reported.

Jorge Delhon threw himself under a train in a Buenos Aires suburb on Tuesday, the newspapers Clarin and La Nacion reported on their websites.

A sports marketing executive, Alejandro Burzaco, testified on Tuesday that Delhon and another man, Pablo Paladino, took in millions of dollars in bribes in exchange for rights to broadcast football games, according to the reports.

The reports said that at the time the two men worked for Football for All, a government programme under former president Cristina Kirchner that held the rights to football broadcasts in Argentina.

Burzaco, the former chairman of Torneos y Competencias SA, detailed in US federal court how his company paid millions of dollars in bribes to South American Football Confederation (Conmebol) executives for more than a decade to secure television rights to major tournaments.

Burzaco, who pleaded guilty in November 2015 to racketeering, wire fraud and money laundering conspiracies, is one of 42 officials and marketing executives indicted.

Three South Americans are on trial in New York — Jose Maria Marin, ex-head of Brazil’s Football Confederation; former Fifa vice president Juan Angel Napout and Manuel Braga, who led Peru’s football federation until 2014.

The trial began on Monday, two and a half years after the United States unveiled the largest graft scandal in the history of world football.