Fifa: one year and eight months suspended prison sentence required against Platini and Blatter

It will soon be the moment of truth.

A week after the opening of the trial, the Swiss prosecution requested, on Wednesday, a year and eight months of suspended prison sentence against Michel Platini and the ex-president of Fifa Sepp Blatter, accusing them of having defrauded the football body by obtaining for the French an unjustified payment of 2 million Swiss francs (1.8 million euros).

Since the opening of this investigation in 2015, Blatter claims to have accepted orally the remuneration claimed by the triple Ballon d'Or when the Swiss leader relied on his sporting aura to take the head of Fifa, in 1998, before make him his adviser.

“When I was elected president of Fifa, we had a bad record.

But I said to myself that a man who has been in football could help us, Fifa and myself, ”he said.

Michel Platini “told me: I'm worth a million.

I told him: So you will be with me for a million, ”added the Swiss, forced to resign in 2015 by a vast corruption scandal, then banned from football after the initiation of criminal proceedings in this case.

Decision on July 8

The prosecution therefore accuses Blatter of having validated in early 2011 an invoice for 2 million Swiss francs (1.8 million euros) presented to Fifa by Michel Platini, then president of UEFA, almost nine years after the end of his work as an adviser between 1998 and 2002. However, not only had the two men never signed an agreement providing for such a salary, but their only written contract in 1999 already fixed an annual remuneration of 300,000 Swiss francs, paid in full at the time by Fifa.

The Federal Criminal Court of Bellinzona will deliver its decision on July 8 in this case which therefore destroyed the careers of the two former bosses of world and European football, and in which they theoretically incur up to five years in prison.