ZURICH (AP) — FIFA’s top officials Sepp Blatter, Jerome Valcke and Markus Kattner awarded themselves pay rises and World Cup bonuses totaling $80 million over their last five years in office.
The contracted payments appear to break Swiss law, and evidence will be given to American and Swiss federal prosecutors who are investigating corruption implicating the world soccer body, lawyers for FIFA said Friday.
“The evidence appears to reveal a coordinated effort by three former top officials of FIFA to enrich themselves through annual salary increases, World Cup bonuses and other incentives totaling more than 79 million Swiss francs — in just the last five years,” said Bill Burck of Quinn Emanuel, the U.S. law firm retained by FIFA during its corruption crisis.
FIFA revealed details of the contracts of its former president Blatter, fired former secretary general Valcke and fired finance director Kattner one day after police raided FIFA to seize evidence for the Swiss investigation.
The raid included searches in the office of Kattner who was fired last week.
Swiss attorney general Michael Lauber opened criminal proceedings against Blatter last September, and against Valcke in March.
Both are suspected of criminal mismanagement of FIFA money. Blatter and Valcke deny wrongdoing but were banned for six and 12 years, respectively, by FIFA’s ethics committee.
No additional criminal proceedings have been opened against Kattner.
“Additionally, FIFA will refer the matter of these contracts and payments to the Ethics Committee for its review,” FIFA said in a statement.
Three weeks after new FIFA President Gianni Infantino claimed that “the crisis is over,” the turmoil rocking soccer’s world governing body continues.
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While that’s a lot of money, to put it in perspective, Roger Goodell, NFL commissioner, makes something like $42 million per year.
While I’m in no position to comment on anyone’s guilt or innocence, I will note that there is a ton of money floating around out there in the sports industry-college and professional.
Roger Goddell does not set his own salary. He works for the owners of the league and they can pay him what they think he is worth. The NFL is easily the richest sports league on the planet.
The FIFA guys are self-dealing. They don’t really answer to anyone. If Roger Goddell was caught stealing from the company kitty he’d be floating in a river by now.
FIFA also isn’t really analogous to the NFL. They one of the within–nation soccer(ahem, football, but I’m disambiguating from NFL here) leagues would be more like that.
That’s exactly right. The heart of FIFA’s problem is the one-country, one-vote system of governance, which gives an insider like Blatter the opportunity to line his pockets on the back of corrupt deals for support from football powers like Montserrat and Kiribati.
Bit of trivia here, but the countries that don’t call it football are English speaking ones that decided to come up with their own versions of rugby football 120-140 years ago–,Australian rule football, Canadian football, American football, even Gaelic Football).