By Andrew Warshaw
February 28 – Jerome Valcke (pictured), former number two to Sepp Blatter who spectacularly fell from grace after spending years as the organisation’s go-to troubleshooter, is taking his 10-year ban to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS).
Valcke was fired as FIFA’s secretary general in January last year for alleged financial impropriety over television deals, World Cup ticket sales, plus expense abuses.
The FIFA ethics committee banned him for 12 years, saying he had “acted against FIFA’s best interests and caused considerable financial damage” by taking private flights for sightseeing trips with his family at the organisation’s expense..
Ethics officials also said he “deliberately tried to obstruct the ongoing proceedings against him by attempting to delete or deleting several files and folders relevant to the investigation”.
FIFA’s appeals committee later reduced the 12-year sanction to 10 but now the Frenchman, who has always maintained he did nothing wrong, is going further and wants the punishment overturned completely even though precedents do not augur well in terms of other FIFA officials seeking to clear their names at CAS.
A brief statement released by CAS read: “Jerome Valcke, former secretary general of the Federation Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), has filed an appeal at the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) against the decision issued by the FIFA appeal committee dated 24 June 2016 (with reasons notified on 3 February 2017), in which he was banned from taking part in any football-related activity for a period of 10 years.
“Jerome Valcke seeks to have the challenged decision set aside in order for the sanction imposed on him to be lifted definitively. A CAS arbitration procedure is in progress.”
If past history is anything to go by, CAS will take several months to reach a verdict. In the meantime Valcke remains under criminal investigation by federal prosecutors in Switzerland.
FIFA ethics investigators are also looking into the $80 million in pay rises and bonuses that Blatter, Valcke and Markus Kattner, former director of finance and corporate services, awarded themselves over a five-year period until they were suspended or fired.
Sources close to Kattner countered at the time he was thrown out that FIFA’s auditors never flagged up any wrongdoing and that the bonus programme was part of FIFA’s official compensation policy.
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