A Swiss court has acquitted former FIFA President Sepp Blatter and French football icon Michel Platini of corruption on appeal, upholding their 2022 acquittal. The ruling from the Swiss Criminal Court’s Extraordinary Appeals Chamber in Muttenz, near Basel, came after an appeal from Swiss federal prosecutors.
The case focused on a payment of 2 million Swiss francs that Blatter authorized to Platini in 2011 for consultancy work done between 1998 and 2002. Platini, a former France captain and UEFA president, had claimed a proportion of his payment had been postponed because of FIFA’s financial troubles at the time. Both men have repeatedly denied any wrongdoing.
Platini’s lawyer, Dominic Nellen, condemned a protracted legal battle, saying that “even the Office of the Attorney General of Switzerland must recognize that these criminal proceedings have definitively failed.” He continued that the case had “strongly sabotaged” Platini’s career by blocking him from running for FIFA presidency in 2016.
The corruption scandal, which burst into the open in 2015, had forced Blatter out of FIFA, and it ended Platini’s aspirations to follow him in the job. With this most recent ruling, both men have been cleared, closing the chapter on a long-waged legal dispute.
