NewYork: The world’s most popular sport was plunged into turmoil today as seven powerful soccer figures were arrested on US corruption charges and faced extradition from Switzerland, whose authorities also announced a criminal investigation into the awarding of the next two World Cups.
The arrests of the senior Fifa officials in a morning raid at a five-star Zurich hotel mark an unprecedented blow against soccer’s powerful governing body, which for years has been dogged by allegations of corruption but always escaped major criminal cases.
US prosecutors said they aimed to make more arrests but would not be drawn on whether Fifa president Sepp Blatter, for long the most powerful man in the sport, was a target of the probe. Blatter, 79, is standing for re-election to a fifth term at the Fifa Congress in Zurich on Friday, and Fifa said the vote would go ahead as planned.
The Fifa officials appeared to have walked into a trap set by US and Swiss authorities. The arrests were made at dawn at a plush Zurich hotel, the Baur au Lac, where Fifa officials are staying before the vote. Suites at the hotel cost up to $4,000 a night.
Almost exactly four years ago, Fifa vice-president Jack Warner had stood in the lobby of the Baur au Lac hotel and warned Fifa a “football tsunami” was about to hit it. His words have finally come true but not in the way he could ever have imagined.
As dawn broke on Wednesday, the doors of the five-star hotel overlooking Lake Zurich burst open and plainclothes officers from the Swiss federal police force swept through the very lobby where Warner had uttered those words in 2011.
They obtained the keys to the rooms of seven Fifa’s delegates, including Warner’s successor as the president of the Concacaf confederation Jeffrey Webb, and led them away on various charges of bribery, racketeering, fraud and money laundering.
This, though, was not the tsunami Warner had in mind when he himself was suspended by Fifa for his alleged part in the bribery scandal that led to his downfall in the build-up to the 2011 Fifa presidential election.
At the time he said he had evidence of bribery going back years that would “hit Fifa and the world and shock you”.
But Warner never did unleash his threatened tsunami. The US department of justice and the Swiss attorney-general have. Warner was today named as one of 14 defendants charged by the US authorities.
They said Warner had solicited bribes worth $10 million from the South African government to host the 2010 World Cup and had diverted bribes for personal use.
US authorities said a total of nine soccer officials and five sports media and promotions executives had been charged with corruption involving more than $150 million in bribes over 24 years.
The US department of justice named those arrested in Zurich as: Webb, Eduardo Li, Julio Rocha, Costas Takkas, Eugenio Figueredo, Rafael Esquivel and Jose Maria Marin.
The US officials said their investigation had exposed complex money-laundering schemes.
Swiss police arrested the seven Fifa officials and detained them pending extradition proceedings to the US, which could take years if they contest the process.
The US took jurisdiction of the case in part because the Internal Revenue Service and the FBI secured the cooperation of US citizen Chuck Blazer, a former top Fifa official, who US officials said had not paid taxes for years.
US law gives the Department of Justice wide authority to bring cases against foreign nationals living abroad, an authority that prosecutors have used repeatedly in international terrorism cases. Those cases can hinge on the slightest connection to the US, like the use of an American bank or Internet service provider.
Switzerland’s treaty with the US is unusual in that it gives Swiss authorities the power to refuse extradition for tax crimes, but on matters of general criminal law, the Swiss have agreed to turn people over for prosecution in American courts.
“As charged in the indictment, the defendants fostered a culture of corruption and greed that created an uneven playing field for the biggest sport in the world,” said FBI director James Comey. “Undisclosed and illegal payments, kickbacks, and bribes became a way of doing business at Fifa.”
Separate from the US investigation, Swiss prosecutors said they had opened their own criminal proceedings against unidentified people on suspicion of mismanagement and money laundering related to the awarding of rights to host the 2018 World Cup in Russia and the 2022 event in Qatar.
US attorney-general Loretta Lynch told reporters at a news conference in New York that her office did not want to impede the 2018 and 2022 World Cups but looked forward to working with Swiss authorities investigating the award of the tournaments.
“Fifa has a lot of soul-searching to do,” she said.
Lynch said in a statement that the charges span “at least two generations of soccer officials who, as alleged, have abused their positions of trust to acquire millions of dollars in bribes and kickbacks”.
The arrests could have implications for sponsorship.
German sportswear company Adidas, long associated with Fifa, said the soccer body should do more to establish transparent compliance standards. Anheuser-Busch InBev, whose Budweiser brand is a sponsor of the 2018 World Cup, said that it was closely monitoring developments at Fifa.
Officials said that following the arrests, accounts at several banks in Switzerland had been blocked.
The international governing body of football collects billions of dollars in revenue, mostly from sponsorship and television rights for World Cups. It has been dogged by reports of corruption which it says it investigates itself.
Fifa’s decision to award the World Cup to Qatar, a tiny desert country with no domestic tradition of soccer, was heavily criticised by soccer officials in Western countries. Fifa was forced to acknowledge that it is too hot to play soccer there in the summer when the tournament is traditionally held, forcing schedules around the globe to be rewritten to move the event.
Qatar’s stock market fell sharply as news of the Swiss investigation emerged. A Russian official said his country would still host the 2018 World Cup.
The Russian foreign ministry said that the arrests were “another case of the illegal extraterritorial application of US laws”.
Three years ago, Fifa hired a former US prosecutor to examine allegations of bribery over the awarding of the World Cups to Qatar and Russia. However, last year it refused to publish his report, releasing only a summary in which it said there were no major irregularities. The investigator quit, saying his report had been mischaracterised.
