Former FIFA chief Sepp Blatter and French football legend Michel Platini were on Tuesday acquitted of corruption charges by a Swiss court for a second time.
The pair — once among the most influential figures in football — were cleared by the Extraordinary Appeals Chamber of the Swiss Criminal Court of charges of fraud, forgery, mismanagement and misappropriation of around €2.1 million of FIFA money in 2011.
The Swiss attorney general's office had challenged a first acquittal of Blatter, 89, and Platini, 69, in July 2022 and asked for sentences of 20 months, suspended for two years.
"After two acquittals, even the Office of the Attorney General of Switzerland must realise that these criminal proceedings have definitively failed," Platini's lawyer Dominic Nellen said in a statement. "Michel Platini must finally be left in peace in criminal matters."
Blatter and Platini have consistently claimed at five different judicial bodies — twice at FIFA, then the Court of Arbitration for Sport and now two Swiss federal criminal courts — they had a verbal "gentleman’s agreement" to one day settle the money in question.
A further appeal to the Swiss Supreme Court can be filed by prosecutors.
Blatter approved FIFA paying 2 million Swiss francs (now €2.1 million) to Platini in February 2011 for supplementary and non-contracted salary working as a presidential advisor between 1998 and 2002. The Frenchman said the money had been partly deferred as football's governing body had not been able to pay him in full at the time.
Details of the payment only emerged in the crisis that hit FIFA in May 2015 when US federal investigators unsealed a sweeping investigation of international football officials.
Swiss authorities made early-morning arrests at hotels in Zurich before seizing FIFA financial and business records.
Before the scandal emerged, Platini was head of European football body UEFA and one of the favourites to succeed Blatter as president of FIFA. Yet the pair have not worked in football since they were suspended by the FIFA ethics committee in October 2015.
Platini’s ban expired in 2019 and Blatter was given a subsequent ban by FIFA in 2021 months before his first was due to end.
Blatter is exiled from football until late in 2028, when he will be 92, because of an ethics prosecution of alleged self-dealing in eight-figure management bonuses paid for successfully organising the men's World Cup in 2010 and 2014.
