The k2p blog

UPDATE!

Sepp Blatter has just resigned from the FIFA presidency. The next president will be chosen at a special congress to be held between December 2015 and March 2016. He continues till then. 

If it turns out that he does not go to Canada for the final of the Women’s World Cup, then I would believe that he has resigned now because the FBI has found some evidence tying him to the shady deals. The reports tonight are that the FBI may well have provided the final straw.

The FIFA General Secretary, Jerome Valcke, was due to travel to Canada to participate in the opening of the Women’s World Cup on June 6th. But yesterday there were reports that he had been named in one of the FBI’s indictments as the “high ranking FIFA official who had transferred monies to Jack Warner. He was not named as a defendant, but nevertheless he cancelled his trip to Canada “because he had important work to do in Zurich”.

The Guardian: Jérôme Valcke, Fifa’s secretary general, emerged in reports as the person described in an indictment filed in federal court in Brooklyn, New York, as a “high-ranking Fifa official” who in 2008 transferred the sum to another Fifa official, Jack Warner.

Valcke is not named as a defendant and has not been accused of any wrongdoing. He was not immediately available for comment. Valcke and Blatter are the top two officials within Fifa.

A spokeswoman for Fifa said the $10m in bank transactions were authorised by the then-chairman of Fifa’s finance committee. That was Julio Grondona, who died in 2014.

BBC: Fifa president Sepp Blatter still intends to travel to Canada for the final of the Women’s World Cup this month despite the crisis engulfing world football’s governing body.

General secretary Jerome Valcke announced on Monday that he will not be making the trip. He was due to attend the opening of the tournament, which begins on 6 June. “It is important that he attends to matters at Fifa’s headquarters in Zurich,” read a statement.

Presumably Jérôme Valcke is concerned that the history of cooperation between the FBI and the RCMP under the US/Canada extradition arrangements is too much of a risk. If the FBI have a warrant out and have passed it onto the RCMP then they would have no choice but to arrest Valcke as soon as he showed up. He could not be transferred to the US without extradition proceedings. I understand the warrant itself could be taken out under some grounds for suspicion even if the FBI only wanted to talk to him.

Now the Women’s World Cup final is due on 5th July and I would not be at all surprised if Sepp Blatter’s lawyers do not permit him to travel to Canada. I am quite sure that the FBI would now like to question him and attending the final, I suspect, will be too much of a risk.

I can imagine the discussions between Blatter’s lawyers and his PR advisors as to when they should announce that he will not be attending the Women’s World Cup Final. My guess is that he will only cancel publicly with less than a week’s notice – but the decision to cancel has probably already been made.

UPDATE: New York Times:

Bribery Inquiry Drawing Closer to FIFA’s President, Sepp Blatter

Tags: FIFA, Jérôme Valcke, Sepp Blatter

This entry was posted on June 2, 2015 at 11:25 am and is filed under Ethics, Football. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.