GENEVA (AP) — Sepp Blatter and Michel Platini lost their appeals at FIFA on Wednesday against their interim 90-day bans for financial wrongdoing in the growing corruption scandal that has shaken world soccer.
Platini’s lawyers quickly criticized a “uniquely one-sided, unjust and biased” investigation against him, and claimed it had taken more than two weeks to notify them of a FIFA appeals committee verdict dated Nov. 3.
“It (FIFA) is also organizing — and is no longer even hiding it — a deliberate and unacceptable strategy of delaying Michel Platini’s campaign for the FIFA presidency,” a spokesman for the former France great’s Paris-based legal firm said in a statement.
The provisional ban stops Platini working as UEFA president and halted his candidature for the FIFA election on Feb. 26. Blatter is also barred from his FIFA presidential office after 17 years.
The rejection of their legal challenges was expected from the appeals panel — chaired by Larry Mussenden, the former attorney general of Bermuda — which rarely overturns judgments by FIFA judicial bodies.
Platini and Blatter can file further appeals to the Court of Arbitration for Sport in Lausanne, Switzerland, where appellants can choose one of the three lawyers to judge their case.
“This decision is not a surprise,” said the spokesman for Platini’s law firm Clifford Chance. The statement noted that sport’s highest court was free of the “pressures exerted within FIFA. He has full trust in CAS to re-establish all of his rights.”
The bans were imposed last month by FIFA’s ethics committee pending full investigations into a $2 million payment Blatter approved for Platini in 2011 as backdated salary. Platini was employed by Blatter as a presidential adviser from 1998-2002.
Both men deny wrongdoing, though they have acknowledged there was no written contract for the extra salary.
Blatter and Platini are expected to appear before FIFA ethics judge Joachim Eckert in December and face lengthy bans if misconduct is found proven.
Switzerland’s attorney general has opened criminal proceedings against Blatter for suspected criminal mismanagement of FIFA money, over Platini’s $2 million and the undervalued sale of Caribbean TV rights for the World Cup.
Swiss federal authorities also questioned Platini at FIFA headquarters on Sept. 25 and are treating him as “between a witness and an accused person,” according to the attorney general Michael Lauber.
Platini is among six men competing to succeed his former mentor Blatter as FIFA president.
While the other five candidates — including UEFA general secretary Gianni Infantino — have passed integrity checks overseen by FIFA’s election committee, Platini’s vetting process is on hold until his ethics case is resolved.
He faces a ban of at least several years if the FIFA ethics court finds him guilty of conflicts of interest and breaching the terms of his suspension. Whatever sanctions Eckert applies can also be appealed to CAS.
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AP Sports Writer Jerome Pugmire in Paris contributed to this report
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