The president of Fifa was heard on Tuesday in Zurich in the context of criminal proceedings opened in 2020 for secret meetings in 2016 and 2017.
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GIanni Infantino was heard by the two extraordinary prosecutors appointed to take over the investigation into the secret meetings of the boss of the International Football Federation (Fifa) with a former head of the Swiss prosecution, confirmed one of the two magistrates to the France Media Agency.
“I confirm that a confrontation hearing took place in the context of the procedure conducted by Dr.r (Ulrich) Weder and myself. However, I am not commenting on the timing, scope and purpose of this hearing,” Hans Maurer said in an email to Agence France-Presse, confirming information from daily newspapers. The world and Sueddeutsche Zeitung. The latter specify that Gianni Infantino was heard on Tuesday in Zurich, the city where the headquarters of Fifa is located.
The president of Fifa, who is a candidate for his succession for a third term in 2023, has been targeted since July 2020 by criminal proceedings for “incitement to abuse of authority”, “violation of official secrecy” and to “obstructing criminal proceedings”. Swiss justice accuses him of three secret meetings in 2016 and 2017 with Michael Lauber, then head of the Public Ministry of the Confederation (MPC), feeding suspicions of collusion between the prosecution and Fifa, civil party in most of the procedures.
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“The new Fifa was a thousand miles from the old one”
The Italian-Swiss (52) ensures for his part that it was a question of showing the prosecution “that the new Fifa was a thousand leagues from the old”. The internal justice of the organization he leads cleared him in August 2020. She had decided to close the case due to “the obvious absence of evidence concerning any alleged violation of the code of ethics”.
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The investigations of the Swiss justice resumed at the end of 2021, after seven months of paralysis following the recusal in May 2021 of the Swiss prosecutor Stefan Keller. The former head of the Swiss prosecution, Michael Lauber, for his part, was dismissed in June 2019 from the investigation into a corruption scandal at Fifa, because of his undeclared contacts in 2016 and 2017 with Gianni Infantino. Very criticized, he ended up resigning a year later, in July 2020, before losing his immunity.