Gianni Infantino will continue to serve as FIFA president, the body said. This position was published despite the criminal proceedings in Switzerland targeting the boss of world football against a background of suspicion of collusion with the resigned head of the Swiss federal prosecutor’s office.
“FIFA and the FIFA president deny any insinuation or allusion leading to believe that the FIFA president has tried to exert undue influence on the Attorney General of the Confederation,” said the world body. “The FIFA President will continue to fully exercise his functions within FIFA and assume his responsibilities. It will continue to cooperate with authorities in Switzerland and around the world, as it has always done, ”added the organization.
Gianni Infantino has been targeted since Thursday by criminal proceedings in Switzerland. The extraordinary federal prosecutor Stefan Keller believes that there are “elements of reprehensible behavior in connection with the meeting between the general prosecutor Michael Lauber, the president of FIFA and the first prosecutor of Upper Valais”, Rinaldo Arnold .
Various offenses
The offenses concerned are “abuse of authority”, “violation of official secrecy” and “obstruction of criminal proceedings”. Criminal proceedings were also opened against Rinaldo Arnold, while Stefan Keller asked “the competent parliamentary committees to authorize the opening of criminal proceedings against” Mr. Lauber, a compulsory passage in Switzerland when it is a question of investigating “members of authorities or magistrates elected by the Federal Assembly”.
Former boss of the Swiss Federal Prosecutor’s Office, Michael Lauber resigned on July 24. He had been in the crosshairs for many months for his management of the procedures relating to the “FIFAgate” which he supervised. Several informal meetings between this magistrate and Gianni Infantino, which took place between 2016 and 2017, had been revealed in the press and in particular by the Football Leaks in 2018, arousing suspicions of collusion.
In the fall of 2015, the former chairman of the body Sepp Blatter and the then president of UEFA, Michel Platini, were provisionally suspended for 90 days by the FIFA Ethics Committee. , a few days after being heard within the framework of an investigation of the Swiss justice – Blatter as defendant and Platini as assisted witness -, for a payment of 2 million francs from the first to the second.
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