Football’s governing body, FIFA, announced on Monday (December 16) that it has filed a civil lawsuit against former president Joseph ‘Sepp’ Blatter and former vice-president Michel Platini to recover CHF 2 million (€1.8 million) paid to Platini in 2011.
The claims have been filed in Swiss courts following the “unanimous resolution recently adopted by the FIFA Governance Committee in which it emphasised that FIFA was duty-bound to try to recover the funds illicitly paid by one former official to another,” the body said in a statement.
It added that once recovered, “these funds (together with interest) will be fully channelled back into football development, which is where the money should have gone in the first place.”
Blatter and Platini were both slapped with an eight-year ban from all football-related activities in 2015 over the payment after a FIFA investigation found that there had been “no legal basis” for it and that both men had been in a situation of “conflict of interest” that they failed to disclose.
The two men had argued that the money had been part of an oral agreement between them and was meant to act as payment to Platini for the four years he served as an advisor to Blatter from 1998-2002.
Their sanctions were then reduced to six and four years respectively in appeal by the Court of Arbitration for Sport.
