Argentine businessman Alejandro Burzaco, in a file image. ANDREW GOMBERT
A New York judge on Tuesday read the final sentence against the star witness in FIFA's corruption scandals. Alejandro Burzaco, the Argentine businessman who indicted a dozen soccer executives and executives from across the Americas after his extradition to the United States in 2015, will not go to prison. The New York federal court in charge of the case considers that he has served his sentence after having pleaded guilty to paying bribes the same year of his capture and complying since then with the requirements to appear in the trials as repentant: to point to fatter fish.
Burzaco was a repentant exemplary. In June 2015, a month after the US Justice denounced 14 FIFA authorities for a scandal of millionaire bribes and money laundering in the government of world soccer, he surrendered in Italy after two weeks on the run. An Argentine with an Italian passport, the television entrepreneur who wanted to project his dominance over the broadcasting rights of Argentine soccer to the rest of South America was arrested in the city of Bolzano and became the second extradited to the United States in the FIFA Gate investigation. His testimony, since then, was the most anticipated.
A former CEO of Argentine production company Torneos, which controlled all television broadcasting of Argentine soccer for decades, Burzaco admitted to paying nearly $30 million in bribes through shell companies and Swiss bank accounts. His testimony was key to the fall of the former president of the South American Football Confederation (CONMEBOL), Paraguayan Juan Angel Napout, the former leader of the Brazilian Football Confederation, José María Marín, and the former Argentine executive of Fox Pan American Sports, Hernán López. All three are serving prison sentences in the United States.
CEO of Torneos from 2006 until he surrendered in 2015, Burzaco was the last tsar of an inherited empire. The company, which was born in 1982 as Torneos y Competencias (TyC), was the great television producer of Argentine sports founded by businessman Carlos Ávila. Its subsidiary, Televisión Satelital Codificada (TSC), took over the broadcasting rights of national football after a negotiation without competition in the early nineties and had the exclusivity to broadcast any goal on television until 2007. Burzaco took the reins in the decline: the teams asked for greater contributions, their partners in the Clarín Group were at odds with the government of then-President Cristina Kirchner, and in 2009 he lost the monopoly of Argentine football, which went on to be televised in open signal financed by the State until 2017.
But Torneos remained an empire. The company maintained the production of some local football matches. It also controlled the content of the most important cable channels of sports television, and was the owner of the broadcasting rights of the Copa Libertadores, the South American, the Copa América, the qualifiers and in charge of marketing abroad the image rights of the Argentine championship. Burzaco came to light a month before his arrest. In May 2015, during a Libertadores match between Boca Juniors and River Plate that was suspended for attacks on visitors, he jumped onto the field covered with a cap next to the CONMEBOL overseer. He was then accused of pushing for the match not to be suspended.
Alejandro Burzaco, right, next to Boca Juniors protégé and a COMEBOL overseer, during a 2015 soccer match.
In the eight years he spent in the United States under house arrest, Burzaco singled out a dozen businessmen and soccer executives. Among them, the name he repeated the most was that of the former president of the Argentine Football Association (AFA) and vice president of FIFA; Julio Grondona, died in 2014. "I bribed Grondona from 2005 until he died in July 2014," Burzaco confessed. In 2006, Grondona received $600,000 per year, but that later went up to one million, and then to $1.2 million."
He also accused Nicolás Leoz, president of CONMEBOL until 2013, of having received bribes; Eduardo Deluca, secretary general of the confederation; Romer Osuna, its treasurer; and Eugenio Figueredo, former Uruguayan football manager. The only one still alive is Figueredo, who is 91 and under house arrest. Burzaco also accused Argentines Pablo Paladino and Jorge Delhon, coordinator and lawyer of the government program that brought soccer to broadcast television, of receiving four million dollars in bribes. The second committed suicide on the same day that the businessman testified in a New York court. Burzaco was released on Friday and can return to Argentina whenever he wants.
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