FIFA and its president Gianni Infantino have responded angrily to the recommendation by a special prosecutor that a Swiss criminal investigation should be launched into his use of a private jet.
The recommendation was the latest legal twist arising out of a case against the country’s former Attorney-General.
Special prosecutor Stefan Keller has been inquiring into meetings Infantino and the then-Attorney-General Michael Lauber in 2016 and 2017. Neither man apparently made formal notes of the meetings and Lauber could not even remember all of them.
This was intriguing since Lauber had been overseeing more than 20 FIFA-linked cases arising from both the contentious 2018/2022 World Cup host awards in 2010 and then the United States-led FIFAGate corruption debacle.
Lauber has since been forced out of office.
FIFA and Infantino have denied all allegations of wrongdoing ever since Keller, in July, opened an initial case against Infantino because of “indications of criminal conduct” over the Lauber meetings
The latest twist of legal events turns once more on the use of a private jet which has long been a fraught issue within FIFA; it was one of the factors which led to the downfall in 2016 of former secretary-general Jerome Valcke.
In Infantino’s case, a private jet was hired to bring him back to Switzerland from Suriname in 2017 after visiting member federations in the Caribbean. Infantino has said he needed it to attend a meeting with UEFA president Aleksander Ceferin though the latter has said he was on vacation at the time.
Keller’s office said he had “completed the examination of the criminal accusations brought against the president of FIFA, Gianni Infantino, for unfair management in connection with the use of a private jet.”
The statement added: “Based on the investigations carried out, Stefan Keller is of the opinion that a criminal investigation must be opened for unfair management.”
Keller has no powers to launch a criminal investigation himself, only submit a recommendation to the public prosecutor’s office.
Infantino and FIFA said they had been “shocked” by Keller’s statement which they considered “both malicious and defamatory in nature and demonstrates his extreme bias.”
FIFA added: “Neither FIFA nor its president have ever been informed of these new spurious allegations and they are therefore unable to comment on them, which is probably the intention of the ‘special prosecutor’.
“The method of ‘special prosecutor’ Stefan Keller to accuse and defame by publishing media releases without justification borders on character assassination and is rejected in the strongest possible terms.
“FIFA and its president will take all necessary legal steps to put an end to these baseless and ill-intentioned accusations.”
Infantino, a 50-year-old Swiss-Italian lawyer, became FIFA president in 2016 and was re-elected in 2019 for a four-year term.
Within his first year in office, Infantino was the subject of an ethics inquiry into expense allowance issues including a number of flights. The investigation was later closed with no action taken.
Earlier this week the Swiss judicial authorities interviewed disgraced ex-FIFA president Sepp Blatter over what he may or may not have known about links between Infantino and Lauber.
