Arms crossed and black eyed, Sepp Blatter remained unmoved when prosecutor Thomas Hildbrand requested against him and Michel Platini, Wednesday June 15, a “a custodial sentence of one year and eight months” suspended with “a probationary period of two years”. Sitting in the front row in the large courtroom of the Swiss Federal Criminal Court (TPF) in Bellinzona, the 86-year-old former president of the International Football Federation (FIFA) suffered without flinching, for nearly five hours, the long indictment of the representative of the Public Ministry of the Confederation (MPC), on the sixth day of his trial.
The second defendant, Michel Platini, was not present: the former boss of the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) was exempted by the TPF from attending the hearings for a week. But, from his house in Cassis (Bouches-du-Rhône), he must have read the verbatim of the sensational charge of Mr. Hildbrand, who completed the investigation of the procedure against MM. Platini and Blatter for “suspicions of fraud, unfair management, breach of trust and forgery in titles”.
Meticulously, the magistrate cut to pieces the defense of the defendants in the case of the alleged unfair payment of two million Swiss francs (1.9 million euros) that Mr. Blatter made, in February 2011, to Mr. Platini . Hands clinging to his desk, he brushed aside the thesis of the “wage balance” which would have been allegedly paid to the French for the years during which (1998-2002) he officiated as an adviser to Sepp Blatter. The defendants claim to have sealed, in 1998, a “oral agreement” fixing an annual remuneration of one million Swiss francs for Mr. Platini.
For Mr. Hildbrand, “no verbal contract existed either before or after Blatter’s election to FIFA [en juin 1998], because it could not legally exist.. He recalls that the two defendants initialed, in August 1999, a contract fixing the remuneration of the ex-player as ” independent “ up to the “salary of the FIFA Secretary General”, at 300,000 Swiss francs annually.
The prosecutor notes that the duo did not indicate on the 1999 contract a possible balance of 700,000 Swiss francs a year which should have been paid ” later “. “ Mr. Blatter says he didn’t think of it. We are not in front of a simpleton coming from the mountains. We’re talking about the president of a billionaire company with a self-declared flair for business affairs,” snapped Mr. Hildbrand, while pointing out, figures in hand, that, “from 2002 to 2010, FIFA had sufficient cash to, if necessary, discharge the alleged claims of Mr. Platini to one million a year”.
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