Just back from Qatar, where he oversaw what he described as “the most beautiful World Cup in history”, Gianni Infantino is back on the court. As learned The world and the German newspaper Suddeutsche Zeitung (SZ), the Swiss-Italian president of the International Football Federation (FIFA) will be heard again as warned, Tuesday, January 10, in Zurich, by the extraordinary prosecutors Ulrich Weder and Hans Maurer. The 52-year-old leader had already been heard in the spring of 2022 by the two magistrates.
This new interrogation is part of the criminal proceedings opened in July 2020 against Mr. Infantino, elected head of FIFA in February 2016, for “incitement to abuse of authority, violation of the secrecy of office and obstruction of criminal proceedings”. Contacted by The worldFIFA declined to comment. “as long as the case is pending”.
For his part, Mr. Maurer confirms the holding of” questioning “ without commenting on the timing, scope and purpose of this hearing”. Elected in December 2021 by the Swiss Federal Assembly, the two extraordinary prosecutors are trying to shed light on three secret meetings (without minutes), in 2016 and 2017, between Mr. Infantino and the former Swiss Attorney General Michael Lauber , in charge of investigations in connection with FIFA between 2015 and 2019 and resigned in 2020.
To do this, they will confront, on Tuesday, the often contradictory versions of seven defendants in the context of this procedure: Gianni Infantino; Mr. Lauber; his ex-spokesman, André Marty; a childhood friend of Mr. Infantino, the first prosecutor of Haut-Valais Rinaldo Arnold; former FIFA legal director Marco Villiger; former federal prosecutor Olivier Thormann; and anti-corruption prosecutor Cédric Remund.
Suspicions of collusion
This “confrontation” is crucial for Mr. Infantino: he hopes for a classification of the criminal proceedings before his scheduled re-election for a new term, at the FIFA congress in Kigali in March.
During their investigation, the magistrates heard several witnesses, such as former federal prosecutors Joël Pahud and Markus Nyffenegger, as well as the former co-patron of the FIFA ethics committee, Cornel Borbély.
Amid suspicions of collusion between FIFA and Swiss prosecutors, MM. Weder and Maurer seek to know what was the content of the discussions during the secret meetings incriminated. In a disciplinary report of March 2020, the supervisory authority of the Public Prosecutor’s Office of the Confederation (AS-MPC) specified that “the reasons for the meetings that Mr. Lauber proposed have proven to be unfounded”. In 2020, the Federal Administrative Court (TAF) concluded that “the Attorney General deliberately concealed the truth from AS-MPC during his hearing on November 12, 2018 and that he consciously silenced the third meeting with the President of FIFA”.
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