After seven months of respite, Gianni Infantino is again in the sights of Swiss justice. Targeted since July 2020 by criminal proceedings for “incitement to abuse of authority, violation of official secrecy and obstruction of criminal proceedings”, the president of the International Football Federation (FIFA) had obtained, in May, from the Federal Criminal Court (TPF), the challenge of the extraordinary prosecutor Stefan Keller, in charge of the investigation against him.
The Swiss Federal Assembly is due to give new impetus to the judicial inquiry on Wednesday 15 December by electing two new extraordinary prosecutors: the senior magistrates Ulrich Weder and Hans Maurer. They will have to shed light on the three secret meetings (without minutes), in 2016 and 2017, between Mr. Infantino – who did not respond to the requests of the World – and the former Swiss Attorney General Michael Lauber, in charge of investigations related to FIFA between 2015 and 2019.
At this stage, in addition to Mr. Infantino, Mr. Lauber, his ex-spokesperson, André Marty, as well as a childhood friend of the president of FIFA, the attorney of Haut-Valais Rinaldo Arnold, are being prosecuted.
Mr. Weder is familiar with affairs related to FIFA: he had investigated, in 2018, the supposed proximity between Olivier Thormann, former head of the criminality division of the Confederation’s Public Prosecutor’s Office (MPC), and Marco Villiger, former FIFA legal director. Mr Weder had at the time issued a dismissal order.
Against the backdrop of suspected collusion between FIFA and Swiss prosecutors, MM. Weder and Maurer will seek to know what was the content of the discussions during these secret meetings. In a disciplinary report from March 2020, the supervisory authority of the Federal Public Prosecutor’s Office (AS-MPC) specified that “The reasons for the meetings which Mr. Lauber proposed have proved to be unfounded”.
This case prompted, in July 2020, the resignation of Mr. Lauber. At the time, the Federal Administrative Court (TAF) concluded that “ the Attorney General deliberately withheld the truth from the AS-MPC during his hearing on November 12, 2018 and that he consciously killed the third meeting with the FIFA President “.
“Collective amnesia”
“Such a case of collective amnesia is an aberration”, had estimated the TAF while MM. Lauber, Marty, Arnold and Infantino in turn “failed” to mention to the authorities their participation in this third meeting organized on June 16, 2017, at the Hotel Schweizerhof in Bern. According to the AS-MPC, that day, the “FIFA procedures” would have been at the center of the discussions.
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