Fifa's 'very bad year' helps explain payment delay, Blatter says

THE dire state of Fifa's finances 2 decades ago helps explain the delay of a US$2.1 million dollar payment to a French football icon that's at the heart of a Swiss corruption trial, ex-Fifa boss Sepp Blatter said during his testimony.

Blatter and Michel Platini, who once ran global soccer's top governing bodies, face charges of embezzlement and forgery over the payment which was only made in 2011, years after Platini ceased working as a consultant to Fifa.

Platini signed a consultancy contract with Fifa in 1999 paying 300,000 Swiss francs (S$421,741) a year, Blatter testified at the Swiss federal criminal court in Bellinzona on Thursday (Jun 9). However, Blatter said a year earlier, when he was elected president of Fifa, he'd struck a gentlemen's agreement sealed with a handshake to pay Platini 1 million francs as a technical director.

"But in 2001, we had a very bad year," Blatter said. "And in 2002 we weren't in position to pay that." Fifa's finances only improved after the 2004 World Cup in Germany, he said.

As he wrapped up his testimony, Blatter repeated his claims that Switzerland's top criminal court was the wrong forum for this case.

"This was a delayed salary payment, nothing more than an administrative matter that should have been handled as a civil case," he said.

Platini, due to take the stand on Thursday, said in a pre-trial statement that "we will prove in court that I acted with the utmost honesty, that the payment of the remaining salary was due to me by Fifa and is perfectly legal."

The trial caps a turbulent decade for Fifa that may not yet be over. In mid-2015 police raided luxury Zurich hotels where its executives had gathered, as part of a coordinated international probe into allegations of racketeering, money laundering and wire fraud. Swiss-born Blatter resigned days later as head of the organisation he'd run since 1998.

The trial comes at an awkward time for Zurich-based Fifa, a private plaintiff in the court proceedings. November's World Cup in Qatar was intended as a festival of international football that would blaze a new trail for the game in the Gulf region. But it's been mired in controversy over allegations of vote-buying in the selection of Qatar as host.

US prosecutors in 2020 issued an indictment against a dozen individuals in which it alleged 3 were paid bribes in 2010 to vote for Qatar. Platini was questioned in 2019 by French financial police, who have been conducting their own investigation into the allegations. BLOOMBERG