Sepp Blatter hit with new corruption charges as Fifa condone slave labour

By Tony Attwood

Of course you may have missed what is going on if you are in the UK, as British papers don’t like reporting the difficulties Fifa are in, in case someone wakes up to the fact that the stadia in Qatar are being built using slave labour.  A bit embarrassing when the streets are filled with protesters saying that all lives matter while Fifa is partially funded by the British tax payer through the morally vacuous FA.

But as Untold tries to point out against the deafening silence of the media, there is a big case blowing up in Switzerland between on the one hand Gianni Infantino, head of Fifa, aided it seems by the head of the Swiss judicial system, and the rest of the Swiss judiciary who are now after both of them.  (Details if you have missed this, are on Untold).

Yet with all eyes on the Infantino case, it turns out Sepp Blatter is not out of the woods yet.   And so the ever vigilant Swiss public prosecutor’s office has just opened an investigation against the former president of Fifa.   He is now accused of the “mismanagement” of a million dollar payment from football funds.

Actually there is no reason for the British press not to know about this, because the source is the Associated Press news agency who must be wondering what is going on, given that the media won’t touch the story.  Why bother to subscribe to AP if you don’t want their reports?

Anyway the new accusation is that Blatter paid this sum to the Federation of Trinidad and Tobago on 13 April 2010.   This was described at first as an interest free loan.  However the loan was then cancelled, but the money was not repaid (allegedly).

So this is yet another twist in the Swiss and American federal investigations into illegal Fifa payments to Jack Warner, the former vice president of Fifa.

After being dismissed from Fifa, Warner has been working hard to avoid extradition to the United States by remaining in his home country of Trinidad.

Meanwhile two former senior FIFA officials – Jérôme Valcke as secretary general, and Markus Kattner as chief financial officer – are also cited within the latest document as being accused. The investigative document is dated May 13, 2020, several weeks after the state judicial system declared that it was closing one of the two criminal proceedings against President Blatter concerning the award to the Caribbean Football Union, then led by Warner, of a television rights contract in 2005.

But Blatter remains under the threat of another part of the criminal proceedings, which concerns a late payment, without written record, of 2 million Swiss francs to Michel Platini.   Despite some sources claiming that the investigations are also now closed this now seems to be not the case.

So we now have on-going cases against the former and current top men, Blatter and Infantino, plus the secretary general and the chief finance officer.  Quite a lot of people when you come to think of it.  And not just that, but people in high places too!

At the same time it is perfectly clear that the 2022 world cup venues have been built by slave labour – which has always been an issue but is doubly so now that people in the UK are concerned about some of the statues in the UK which appear to celebrate the lives of slave traders.

As noted in previous articles (for example If all lives matter, if slavery is unacceptable, what is the FA doing about Qatar?) if footballers are currently taking  the knee to show their solidarity with the current protests about discrimination, what are they going to do when invited to play football in stadia that have been built on slave labour.

What football and the compliant British media that serves it in such a servile manner normally does, is ignore footballing issues that don’t fit into its agenda.  The world cup is a “good thing” and so Fifa is a “good thing” and so let’s forget about slave labour in Qatar.   After all the British public aren’t interested in politics.  They just want to see a game of football.

That’s not quite what the players who take the knee are saying.

 

• If all lives matter, if slavery is unacceptable, what is the FA doing about Qatar?
• British media universally continues to support modern slavery