Sepp Blatter and Michel Platini face being thrown out of football for years on the basis of new secret evidence of financial wrongdoing passed to Fifa’s ethics committee in the past few days, a senior source inside the world governing body has told The Mail on Sunday.
If it transpires to be as damning as insiders believe, Blatter’s 17-year reign as president will be over for good, while Platini’s future in football politics will be in shreds.
“Emotions are high at present but this is far more serious than anyone can imagine,” said a high-ranking source close to the ethics committee last night. “The reality is that this is beyond clumsiness, it possibly verges on a criminal offence.”
Blatter and Platini have been suspended for 90 days while the ethics committee investigate an irregular “disloyal” payment of £1.3million to Platini, sanctioned by Blatter, in 2011.
Both men insist they are innocent. Platini is seeking to have his suspension overturned via an appeal by the French FA to the Court of Arbitration for Sport so he can formally declare as a Fifa presidential candidate to succeed Blatter before the deadline of October 26.
It remains uncertain, however, whether that February election will go ahead.
With the leaders of Fifa and Uefa suspended, both beleaguered organisations have called emergency sessions of their top brass within the next 10 days to try to negotiate a path through the mayhem.
Last night Michel De Hooghe, the veteran Belgian who sits on both the Fifa and Uefa executive committees, summed up the mess.
“I have never known a situation like this,” he told The Mail on Sunday. “We have a president and a general secretary [Jerome Valcke] suspended and we have to make Fifa more transparent so that what has happened in the past cannot be repeated.
“I have no idea why the election should be postponed but there may be arguments on both sides. The most important thing is the future of Ffa.”
In a separate development, the MoS can reveal Blatter, while Fifa president, secretly warned fellow executive Jack Warner about involvement in corrupt or inappropriate activity multiple times but never reported it to anyone else.
Secret internal Fifa documents obtained by the MoS show Blatter knew of alleged corruption involving Warner and kept it to himself.
This is not the first time Blatter has been the subject of an ethics committee investigation.
In 2011, he was accused of knowing Warner was involved in a bribery racket but failing to tell anyone about it.
It was later established that Warner had facilitated a meeting in Trinidad where Caribbean football officials attended a speech by Fifa presidential candidate Mohamed Bin Hammam and many of them subsequently pocketed “gifts” of $40,000 in cash.
Warner claimed Blatter knew money was going to change hands. Chuck Blazer, another former Fifa executive committee member, corroborated this version of events. Blatter denied it. But in documents seen by the MoS, which detail what Blatter told an ethics committee hearing, the 79-year-old admits Warner notified him of what was about to happen.
In a written statement to the Fifa ethics committee, Blatter said: “Warner told me that at the planned special CFU Congress, the CFU members would receive money from Mohamed Bin Hammam.”
In a short, verbal hearing with the ethics committee in 2011, in which Blatter was treated deferentially, he claimed he was innocent of failing to act because he saw no evidence “until later” that bribes were actually going to be paid.
Blatter said to the ethics committee that he told Warner “he should refrain” from organising any meeting where bribes were paid.
Blatter’s defence was based on this claim: that he’d told Warner not to get involved in irregular meetings.
Blatter, referring to previous warnings he had given Warner, told the ethics committee: “It was not the first time I told him that.”
Blatter told the ethics committee he himself was innocent, and that he would tell the upcoming Fifa congress he had a “zero tolerance” approach to wrongdoing. “This is since two months, zero tolerance,” he said.
The ethics committee, chaired by Petrus Damaseb, a Fifa official from Namibia, found Blatter innocent. At the end of his hearing, Damaseb asked Blatter: “Are you happy with everything that has transpired? Have we treated you fairly, are you unhappy with the way in which anything has transpired here this afternoon, sir?”
Blatter replied: “Definitely, chairman. You and the committee members, you treated me fairly. This is exactly what we want. It is respect; it is discipline and fair play. Thank you so much. Warner was subsequently allowed to resign in June 2011 from Fifa and all ethics proceedings against him were dropped. Fifa released a warmly worded statement thanking for him for his contribution to football and said “the presumption of innocence is maintained” over any allegations against him.
When Bin Hammam later challenged his own ban at the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), Blatter was called to give evidence.
In CAS paperwork, it is noted Blatter was uncooperative on some matters: “Mr Blatter declined to answer questions concerning the circumstances of Mr Warner’s resignation and the termination of disciplinary proceedings against him, as well as the relationship between these two events.”
The American authorities are in the process of trying to extradite Warner from Trinidad to the USA to face multiple corruption charges.
As and when that happens, it is possible Warner could tell all he knows about long-term corruption at Fifa, as indeed both his sons and Blazer have already done.
One crucial detail is what Blatter knew, if anything, about a $10m bribe paid in relation to the hosting of the 2010 World Cup in South Africa. - Mail on Sunday