Blatter given a new ban for payments
FORMER FIFA president Sepp Blatter has been handed a new ban from football after being found to be part of a “vicious circle” of officials who sought to award themselves over £50m in undeclared payments.
Blatter, 85, is currently serving a sixyear suspension for earlier ethics breaches which expires in October, at which point a new ban for a further six years and eight months will kick in for behaviour which FIFA’S ethics committee described as “completely reprehensible”.
The new suspension, if not reduced on appeal, would run until June 2028 when Blatter would be 92.
He was found to have accepted undue economic benefits totalling 23 million Swiss francs (just under £18m) and approved payments or bonuses of a further 46m Swiss francs (just under £36m) to other officials. In addition to the ban, he was fined one million Swiss francs (just under £780,000).
Former FIFA secretary general Jerome Valcke was one of the officials who benefited from the undue payments. Like Blatter, he was banned for a further six years and eight months and fined one million Swiss francs.
He is currently serving a 10-year ban imposed in 2015; again, his new suspension will only begin when the current sanction runs out.
Undue benefits to Blatter were authorised by Valcke and Julio Grondona, the former president of the Argentinian football federation who died in 2014.
Blatter then approved a variety of benefits, in the form of amended contract agreements or bonus payments, to Valcke, Grondona and FIFA’S former finance director Markus Kattner.
The men were found by FIFA’S ethics investigators to have “set up a scheme through which they were allowing themselves to obtain extraordinary benefits with a minimum of effort”.
A written judgement published yesterday added: “This vicious circle saw three of them (Blatter, Grondona and Valcke) signing the amendment contracts of the others and approving the respective extraordinary bonuses, while the fourth (Kattner) was in charge of implementing the payment of such bonuses.”
Investigators found employment contracts for Blatter, Valcke and Kattner were amended “without any supervision or control from an internal or external body in FIFA” and that the officials involved “actively concealed” the bonus payment awards by not fully declaring them in the organisation’s financial records.
Incredibly, it also found that within the amended contracts for Valcke and Kattner, which Blatter approved, were indemnity clauses which meant they would be due financial compensation even in the event that their employment was terminated with good cause.
Valcke was found to have accepted undue benefits worth 30m Swiss francs – 9m in relation to the 2010 World Cup, 10m in relation to the 2013 Confederations Cup and 2014 World Cup in Brazil, and 11m in relation to the 2017 Confederations Cup and 2018 World Cup in Russia.