Fifa ethics committee asks for sanctions against Sepp Blatter and Michel Platini
Fifa’s ethics committee has concluded investigations into suspended president Sepp Blatter and Uefa president Michel Platini and is understood to be seeking lengthy bans for the pair, The Guardian reported.
A statement from the investigatory chamber of the committee said final reports had been submitted containing “requests for sanctions” over a payment made to Platini by Fifa in 2011.
It is understood this request will be for bans of several years based on four potential ethics code breaches: mismanagement, conflict of interest, false accounting and non co-operation with or criticising the ethics committee.
There was no written agreement for the 2million Swiss franc payment – Blatter and Platini say it was an oral agreement made between them 13 years previously. It is also being investigated by Swiss legal authorities as a “disloyal payment”, and the fact they did not report it the outstanding debt to Fifa’s financial department in the intervening years could be a case of false accounting.
The next step is for Hans-Joachin Eckert, the German judge who heads the adjudicatory panel of the ethics committee, to decide whether to summon Platini and Blatter to disciplinary hearings. He is likely to make that decision early next week after studying the investigators’ report.