Ten years after a sulphurous collaboration, the trial between Michel Platini, Sepp Blatter and FIFA, for suspicious payment, ended with a relaxation.
Legend of French and world football, Michel Platini, former president of UEFA, was involved for more than 10 years in a suspicious payment case with Sepp Blatter, former boss of FIFA. In September 2015, the Attorney General of Switzerland opened a criminal procedure for “unfair management” and “breach of trust” against Sepp Blatter, accused of “unfair” payment of two million Swiss francs (1.8 million euros at the time) in favor of Michel Platini, after his mission as “special advisor to the president” of FIFA between 1998 and 2002.
The two men had been quickly suspended by the FIFA ethics committee of all activity in football. In 2022, during the Swiss justice trial, when the prosecution had requested a year and eight months suspended prison sentence against Platini, the two men were acquitted from the “scam, unfair management, breach of trust and false in the titles”.
And it is still the release that Swiss justice pronounced for Michel Platini and Sepp Blatter on March 25, on appeal. The two men hammered him for 10 years: they had decided on an annual salary of 1 million Swiss francs by a “gentlemen agreement”, without contract, by oral, and without witness, without the finances of FIFA allowing the immediate payment to Platini. This explains the contract for an annual remuneration of 300,000 Swiss francs in 1999, followed by the disputed payment in 2011.
The Frenchman “was worth his million”, explained Sepp Blatter during the trial, denying any “false bill”, before Platini recounts at the helm this fairly lunar negotiation with the former master of world football: first “surprised” that Sepp Blatter asked him for his salary claims, Platini says he asked a million “at random”. “He asked me ‘a million what’ I wanted to joke a little and I said ‘a million of what you want: rubles, pesetas, reads’. And Mr. Blatter said ‘a million Swiss francs'”.
“He said to me: ‘I will give you the balance later, when we have money at FIFA’,” continued the former captain of the Blues, who therefore presented in January 2011 an invoice of 2 million Swiss francs to the football body.
If suspicions of arrangements between Platini and Blatter for his re -election at the head of FIFA in 2015 have been able to emerge, they were never proven. Regarding the disputed payment, the defense of Sepp Blatter argued that the latter had not won a penny in the case. Michel Platini’s lawyers considered that, for his part, he “had various much simpler means” to get rich, such as negotiating a bonus or signing a new contract.
For Michel Platini, this trial was also an opportunity to claim a “moral reparation”, his career having been “brutally ruined” when he had to reach the heights of the football bodies, asking to become in turn president of FIFA after the withdrawal of Sepp Blatter.