Acquittals for Sepp Blatter (pictured) and Michel Platini at second instance.
Keystone-SDA
Select your language
Generated with artificial intelligence.
Listening: Blatter and Platini cleared in corruption case
A Swiss court has confirmed the acquittals of former FIFA president Sepp Blatter and former UEFA president Michel Platini at first instance. It acquitted the two former football officials of all charges.
This content was published on
2 minutes
Keystone-SDA
Deutsch
de
Freisprüche für Sepp Blatter und Michel Platini in zweiter Instanz
Original
The prosecution’s case centred on a payment of CHF2 million ($2.25 million) to Platini for FIFA consultancy work following a verbal contract with Blatter. The evidence supports the statement that this payment was a residual salary, said the court president in his judgement. The Extraordinary Appeals Chamber in Muttenz, canton Basel Country, therefore had doubts about the indictment, which led to an acquittal for the two “in dubio pro reo”.
The federal prosecutor’s office had accused the two of fraud, embezzlement, aiding and abetting and forgery of documents, among other things. Following the acquittals, they lodged an appeal with the Federal Criminal Court in 2022.
Translated from German by DeepL/ts
This news story has been written and carefully fact-checked by an external editorial team. At SWI swissinfo.ch we select the most relevant news for an international audience and use automatic translation tools such as DeepL to translate it into English. Providing you with automatically translated news gives us the time to write more in-depth articles.
If you want to know more about how we work, have a look here, if you want to learn more about how we use technology, click here, and if you have feedback on this news story please write to english@swissinfo.ch.
Is your place of origin, your Heimatort, important to you?
Every Swiss citizen has a Heimatort, a place of origin, but many have never visited theirs. What’s your relationship with your Heimatort? What does it mean to you?
Train vs plane: would you take a direct train between London and Geneva?
Eurostar is planning to run direct trains from Britain to Germany and Switzerland from the early 2030s. Would you favour the train over the plane? If not, why not?
You can find an overview of ongoing debates with our journalists here . Please join us!
If you want to start a conversation about a topic raised in this article or want to report factual errors, email us at english@swissinfo.ch.