New ban for former Fifa boss Blatter
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 £50million in undeclared payments.
Blatter, 85, is currently serving a six-year 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”.