August 1 – Four months after pleading not guilty, former Guatamalan football chief Brayan Jimenez has changed his plea to guilty in a US court to charges racketeering and wire fraud as part of the FifaGate scandal and faces up to 20 years in prison.
Jimenez, 62, a former member of FIFA’s committee for Fair Play and Social Responsibility, negotiated and accepted bribes worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in awarding media and marketing rights for his country’s qualifier matches for the 2018 and 2022 World Cups, prosecutors said.
Jimenez, who was detained in January and extradited to the United States two months later, initially pleaded not guilty to all charges and was placed under house arrest after posting a $1.5 million bond, $75,000 of it in cash.
He is among more than 40 individuals and entities charged as part of the US-led investigation into widespread corruption worth $200 million that has seen a spate of senior officials brought down.
US prosecutors say Jimenez, head of the Guatemalan Football Federation (Fedefut) from 2010 until last year, and his former secretary-General Hector Trujillo took a “six-digit bribe” in exchange for selling the television rights to World Cup qualifiers to the sports marketing firm Media World. Trujillo was arrested in the US in 2015.
A statement from the US Department of Justice said: “Over a period of years, Media World transmitted these bribes from its US bank accounts to the defendant and a co-conspirator, often using intermediaries in the United States and Guatemala.”
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