Former Fifa president Sepp Blatter and Michel Platini cleared in corruption case

Sepp Blatter and Michel Platini have been acquitted for a second time on charges of fraud, forgery, mismanagement and misappropriation of $2.2m (£1.7m) of Fifa money in 2011.

The attorney general’s office in Switzerland had challenged a first acquittal in July 2022 and asked for sentences of 20 months, suspended for two years, for the former Fifa and Uefa presidents. However the federal criminal appeals court accepted the two men’s explanation that the payment had been for consultancy work.

Blatter, now aged 89, gave little reaction listening to the verdict of three cantonal judges acting as a federal criminal appeals court. Sitting in the row in front of Platini, Blatter alternately tapped his fingers and held his left hand over his mouth. Platini sat with his arms folded or rubbing his hands as he listened to a translator sitting beside him relating the court’s verdict in German into his native French.

The complex case centred around a payment made from Fifa to Platini with Blatter’s approval in 2011 for supplementary and non-contracted salary working as a presidential advisor from 1998-2002. Swiss prosecutors had described the payment as “without a legal basis” and said it had “unlawfully enriched Platini” because there was no written contract at the time.

However, both men maintained they had struck a verbal gentleman’s agreement for the Frenchman to be paid backdated additional salary for advising Blatter between 1998 to 2002, which Platini had not received at the time because of Fifa’s perilous finances.

“Michel Platini must finally be left in peace in criminal matters,” his lawyer Dominic Nellen said in a statement. “After two acquittals, even the office of the attorney general of Switzerland must realise that these criminal proceedings have definitively failed.”

View image in fullscreen Former Fifa president Sepp Blatter arrives to hear the verdict into his hearing in Switzerland. Photograph: Stefan Wermuth/Reuters

“The criminal proceedings have had not only legal but also massive personal and professional consequences for Michel Platini, although no incriminating evidence was ever presented,” Nellen added, before suggesting further legal action “against those responsible for the criminal proceedings”.

The latest win for Blatter and the 69-year-old Platini came exactly nine-and-a-half years after a Swiss federal investigation in September 2015 kicked off events that ended the careers of football’s most powerful men. On that day in Zurich, police came to interrogate Blatter and Platini at Fifa after an executive committee meeting when Platini was a strong favourite to succeed his one-time mentor in an upcoming election.

The emergence of the payment also led to Blatter ending his reign as Fifa president in disgrace, while Platini lost his job as president of Uefa, the European governing body, after his ban.

Judges on Fifa’s ethics committee subsequently banned both men from football. Platini has always maintained that the case was a deliberate attempt to thwart his attempt to become Fifa president in 2015.

Though federal court trials have twice cleared their names, Blatter’s reputation will always be tied to leading Fifa during corruption crises that took down a swath of senior officials worldwide.

A further appeal to the Swiss supreme court can be filed by prosecutors.

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