By Andrew Warshaw
April 20 – Yet another significant twist has emerged over undocumented dealings between FIFA president Gianni Infantino and Switzerland’s judiciary authorities.
Last month Swiss attorney general Michael Lauber, who led the Swiss side of the FIFAgate probe, was sanctioned for disloyalty, lying and breaching his office’s code of conduct. And last week Switzerland’s federal court went a step further by preventing Lauber’s bid to rejoin investigations of corruption into FIFA.
Unofficial dealings between Lauber and Infantino, just as the latter was considering seeking the FIFA presidency, led to heightened speculation over the relationship between Infantino and the Swiss judiciary. Le Monde in France recently claimed a lawyer friend of Infantino, Rinaldo Arnold, met with Lauber in July 2015 – eight months before Infantino landed the FIFA presidency – allegedly to find out if Infantino was the target of any corruption probe as he prepared to launch his campaign to take over from Blatter.
Now, German and Swiss media are reporting that another high-ranking Swiss prosecutor investigating corruption in football met in secret with Infantino, this time 16 months after he took over from Blatter.
Citing unnamed sources, Sueddeutsche Zeitung and Luzerner Zeitung alleged that Cedric Remund was the previously unidentified fifth person at a meeting with Infantino and Lauber in Bern on June 16, 2017, along with Lauber’s spokesperson André Marty and Arnold, first prosecutor of the canton of Haut-Valais.
The meeting was apparently never reported by Lauber but has inevitably led to further suspicions about alleged collusion.
If proven, according to the two publications whose reports were picked up by agencies, it could potentially seriously compromise a number of high-profile football corruption probes of which Remund was directly in charge.
These are said to include the investigation into Nasser Al-Khelaïfi , Qatari boss of Paris-Saint-Germain (PSG) and head of BeIN Media, and disgraced former FIFA secretary general Jérôme Valcke.
Remund’s remit also apparently included the five-year probe into alleged tax fraud relating to the 2006 World Cup – a case focussing on three former high-ranking German officials. The trial of Theo Zwanziger, Horst Schmidt and Wolfgang Niersbach plus ex-FIFA number two Urs Linsi has been postponed to April 20 due to the Covid-19 epidemic amid suggestions it might never happen.
Remund is also reported to be directly engaged in the ongoing Swiss criminal prosecution against Blatter over the notorious CHF 2 million “disloyal payment” made in 2011 to Michel Platini.
And finally, according to the Süddeutsche Zeitung , he was involved in proceedings relating to a questionable Champions League television rights contract signed off in 2006 by Infantino when he was at UEFA according to files released as part of the Panama Papers offshore tax haven affair four years ago which laid bare the activities of the rich and powerful.
At the time of the allegations, Infantino and UEFA distanced themselves from any suggestion that they were complicit in shady dealings. Strenuously denying any wrongdoing, Infantino said: “I am dismayed and will not accept that my integrity is being doubted by certain areas of the media, especially given that UEFA has already disclosed in detail all facts regarding these contracts.”
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