Published on : 04/19/2020 – 6:12 p.m.Modified : 04/19/2020 – 6:11 p.m.
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Berlin (AFP)
The Swiss prosecutor in charge of investigations concerning the International Football Federation (Fifa) secretly met its president Gianni Infantino in 2017, Swiss and German newspapers say in investigations fueling suspicions of collusion between Fifa and the Swiss public prosecutor’s office.
Cédric Remund, young prosecutor (38 years old) of the Public Prosecutor’s Office of the Swiss Confederation (MPC), is the fifth person, hitherto unidentified, who participated in a secret meeting with Infantino and the Swiss Attorney General Michael Lauber at the hotel Schweizerhof in Bern on June 16, 2017, according to the German daily Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ) and the Swiss Luzerner Zeitung who cite anonymous sources.
Michael Lauber had been dismissed in June 2019 from the Fifa investigation and sanctioned by a salary reduction of 8% for a period of one year mainly because of this meeting which he said he did not remember. Cédric Remund succeeded him at the helm of investigations targeting the governing body of world football.
This did not prevent Michael Lauber from being re-elected Attorney General of the Confederation by the Swiss Parliament in September.
The Supervisory Authority of the Swiss Prosecutor’s Office (AS-MPC), which sanctioned the public prosecutor for having “not told the truth” and “acted in an unfair manner”, had already established that a fifth person was present at the secret meeting of June 2017, in addition to Michael Faber his spokesperson André Marty, Gianni Infantino and Rinaldo Arnold, a friend of the president of Fifa and also the first prosecutor of the canton of Haut-Valais.
It is therefore, according to the German and Swiss daily newspapers, Cédric Remund who directly leads the corruption investigation aiming at the attribution of the 2006 World Cup to Germany and also another concerning a suspect contract of rights television, revealed by the Panama Papers, between UEFA and two Argentinian businessmen in 2006. A contract signed by Gianni Infantino then secretary general of the European body.
© 2020 AFP
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