On October 30, 2020, Nasser Al-Khelaïfi and Jérôme Valcke won a legal and media victory. On that day, the Qatari president of Paris-Saint-Germain and the BeIN Media group and the former French secretary general of the International Football Federation (FIFA) were respectively acquitted by the criminal court of the Swiss Federal Criminal Court ( TPF) of the counts of “instigation of aggravated unfair management” and of “aggravated unfair management”.
This judgment sounded like a disavowal for the public prosecutor of the Swiss Confederation (MPC), which then appealed in February, requesting “Modifications of the judgment of first instance with a view to the conviction of the accused for the offenses which were the subject of the indictment”. In September, during the trial of the two men, the prosecution requested twenty-eight months of partial suspended detention against Mr. Al-Khelaïfi and thirty-six months against Mr. Valcke.
The boss of the PSG was accused by the MPC of having acquired for 5 million euros, on December 31, 2013, a villa in Sardinia through a company of which he would have quickly sold the shares to a relative, in order to make it available to FIFA number two at the time.
The MPC criticized Mr. Valcke for having received from Mr. Al-Khelaïfi benefits worth between 1.4 million and 2.3 million euros, in particular “The exclusive use of Villa Bianca”, from March 2014 to September 2015. For the investigators, he had done ” in return “ the granting to Qatari groups Al-Jazeera and BeIN Media of media rights in the Middle East and North Africa for the 2026 and 2030 World Cups. A commercial contract was signed by FIFA to this effect in April 2014 , against 480 million dollars.
A severe charge against the defendants
The world consulted the reasoned judgment of the TPF. Certain passages of this document (213 pages) constitute a severe charge against the defendants. The court thus considers that “Notwithstanding the criminal acquittal from which they benefited”, these latter “Have entered into a corruptive arrangement”.
From the outset, the TPF recalls that if “The suspicions of private corruption weighing on MM. Valcke and Al-Khelaïfi ” did “The subject of a classification order”is that FIFA wished “Conclude an amicable agreement” with Mr. Al-Khelaïfi and decided, in January 2020, to withdraw his criminal complaint for private corruption filed in December 2016.
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