Former UEFA president Michel Platini revealed that he filed a complaint in France for influence peddling against the current FIFA president, Gianni Infantino, whom he considers responsible for a plot to remove him from the highest instance of world football.
The complaint, filed last November with the French Prosecutor’s Office, seeks to have the French justice take charge of this investigation, already closed by their Swiss counterparts.
It is the second time that Platini tries to have the matter addressed by French magistrateswhich at first, given the fact that the defendants were Swiss, delegated the case to the Swiss authorities, which closed it by prescription.
In this new complaint, Platini asks the Prosecutor’s Office to question Infantino, but also the former director of FIFA’s legal services Marco Villiger, for complicity.
It also requests that they be questioned, in addition to Infantino and Villiger, other personalitiessuch as the first prosecutor of the Upper Valais court, Ricardo Arnold, or the former Swiss federal chief prosecutor Oliver Thormann.
He also asks that the former head of the Public Ministry of the Confederation André Marty and the former Swiss Attorney General Michael Lauber be questioned.
The latter is a key character in Platini’s complaint, since he had a meeting with Infantino in the days before the corruption within FIFA began to be investigated, which ended with the convictions of Sepp Blatter and the former French soccer player.
Both were barely sentenced by the FIFA disciplinary authorities. In the case of Platini, a six-year suspension from all football-related activities, reduced to four by the Court of Arbitration for Sport (TAS).
Although that sanction expired in 2019, it prevented Platini from running for the presidency of FIFA in 2016, which left Infantino, who had been his right-hand man for years at the head of UEFA, free to preside over that body.
The former French captain and coach has always maintained that it was a plot to deprive him of access to the FIFA presidency, for which he was the favorite once Blatter fell from grace.
Platini was acquitted by the Swiss justice of the accusations of having illicitly collected a commission of 1.8 million euros from FIFA for advising Blatter.
The former soccer player acknowledges that he did collect the money, but that he did so based on a verbal contract that he had with the then president of FIFA.
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Platini denounces Infantino for a plot to remove him from FIFA