Ex-FIFA president Sepp Blatter and former UEFA president Michel Platini arrived at a court in Switzerland on Monday for their retrial on fraud, forgery, and misappropriation charges.
“I am hopeful,” Blatter, 89, told reporters as he walked down a flight of stairs towards the courthouse in Muttenz, near Basel.
Ten minutes after Blatter, his co-defendant Platini, who was a former UEFA president and FIFA vice president and was widely regarded as one of the finest soccer stars to ever play, arrived at the court.
The pair are facing their second trial, nearly three years after they were acquitted by three federal judges.
The charges concern a FIFA payment of 2 million Swiss francs (now $2.21 million) to Platini, which Blatter approved.
The initial acquittal came at a lower Swiss court in 2022, some seven years after the investigation first became public, and they were removed from their respective offices as leaders of FIFA and UEFA.
The Swiss federal prosecutor appealed against the acquittal, leading the new hearing at the Extraordinary Appeals Chamber of the Swiss Criminal Court in Muttenz, near Basel.
“The Office of the Attorney General of Switzerland (OAG) has filed an appeal against the first-instance judgment and submitted a statement of appeal in October 2022 requesting that the judgment be set aside in full,” the prosecutor said.
Prosecutors have asked for sentences of 20 months, suspended for two years.
Both accused have consistently denied wrongdoing and claim they had a verbal agreement that Platini would eventually be paid for non-contracted work advising Blatter during his first presidential term from 1998 to 2002.
This trial comes more than 14 years after the payment was made and more than nine years after Swiss federal investigators formally opened their case against the two men, who were two of soccer’s biggest power players for decades.
Details of the payment emerged in fallout from the corruption crisis that hit FIFA in May 2015, sending shockwaves through the world of international soccer.
U.S. federal investigators unsealed a probe of international soccer officials, which led to Swiss authorities making early-morning arrests at hotels in Zurich before seizing FIFA’s financial and business records.
Blatter and Platini were acquitted in July 2022 after an 11-day trial at Switzerland’s federal criminal court in Bellinzona.
An appeal was filed months later by the Swiss attorney general’s office, and the retrial was delayed after Platini won a ruling last year ordering federal appeal judges be recused. The second trial has now opened at a cantonal courthouse sitting as a federal tribunal. It is being heard by three judges each from different cantons. Cantons are Swiss states, with the nation made up of 26 separate cantons.
Neither Blatter nor Platini has worked in the sport since they were suspended by the FIFA ethics committee in October 2015.
They were later banned and failed to overturn those rulings in separate appeals to the Court of Arbitration for Sport in 2016.
Platini’s ban expired in 2019 but Blatter was given a subsequent prohibition by the organization he ran for 17 years in 2021, just months before his first was due to end.
Blatter, a native of Switzerland, will remain exiled from soccer until late 2028—when he will be 92 years old—because of an ethics prosecution for alleged self-dealing in eight-figure management bonuses paid for organizing the World Cups in 2010 and 2014.
“I am completely confident I will be cleared, I am an honest man.”
He went on to label the appeal “absolute nonsense.”
Platini is also confident of being acquitted, said the 69-year-old’s lawyer.
“The court of first instance was right to find that the disputed payment of 2 million francs was lawful,” the Frenchman’s lawyer Dominic Nellen said.
“My client denies any criminal behavior and is relaxed about the appeal hearing. He will also be acquitted there.”
The second trial is expected to last four days through to Thursday, with the verdict from three judges scheduled for March 25.
