Today, Michel Platini and Sepp Blatter, two heavyweights of the global football administration, were cleared of corruption charges. According to a report in The Guardian, the Swiss attorney general’s office had asked for 20 months in prison with two years of the sentence suspended. This case centered around a payment of $2.2 million to Blatter from Platini in the name of non-contracted work done when Platini was advising Blatter’s campaign to be re-elected as FIFA president from 1998 to 2002. According to a report in the BBC, this case was tied in with the wider FIFA scandal and other high-ranking FIFA officials participating in corruption and bribery on an industrial scale. While this is no surprise to me, it is a sad indictment of the state of football that this type of corruption is accepted so readily and that supporters face ever-increasing prices. At the same time, the administrators who run the game continue to rich off the people who love the beautiful game so much.
Tag: Switzerland
Allegations of Corruption at The Lebanese Central Bank.
Recently, allegations of embezzlement, money laundering, and illicit enrichment have been leveled at the head of the Lebanese central bank Riad Salameh, his brother Raja, and an advisor to Riad. According to an article by the BBC, Salameh and his brother allegedly stole $300 million from Banque Du Liban between 2002 and 2015. Lebanon is a country that, in recent years, has been in the grip of a prolonged recession. According to statistics in the BBC article, 80 percent of the population in Lebanon lives in poverty. A report in Reuters stated that Salameh and his brother allegedly funneled the stolen money through a shell company called Forry Associates based in the British Virgin Islands. It was alleged that a large portion of the funds stolen was used to purchase real estate in European countries.
The Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority (FINMA) announced that it was investigating twelve banks that are thought to have aided Salameh in his misdeeds. FINMA recently froze the Swiss assets of Salameh. Several well-known banks, such as HSBC, where Salameh holds an account, could be caught up in the investigation. The situation regarding the charges Salameh faces in Lebanon is more complex. An article by The National News, an English-language newspaper based in the United Arab Emirates, reports that Raja Hamoush, the public prosecutor for Beirut, confirmed that Salameh was being charged with embezzlement, money laundering, and illicit enrichment. In a separate article by The National, another investigation of similar scope was started in 2021 by Lebanese judge Jean Tannous. This appears to be a tangled legal web that will take some time to resolve if it gets sorted out.
Crispin Corruption Report 