Infantino Accepted Putin-Linked Private Jets, FIFA Ethics Probe Reveals

The British newspaper”The Telegraph”, through journalist Sam Wallace, has lifted the lid on the 2016 FIFA Ethics Committee investigation into Gianni Infantino, publishing details that had never been made public before.

Infantino won the FIFA presidency on 26 February 2016. By June of that year, senior officials had already filed formal complaints about his conduct.

The report claims Infantino accepted seats on private jets from Vladimir Putin’s government and from the Emir of Qatar. He also turned an invitation to meet Pope Francis into a private trip for his elderly mother, and he refused to sign a salary contract worth two million Swiss francs, branding the amount “insulting”.

The 2016 investigation

Vanessa Allard led the investigation. Then FIFA’s chief investigator and now a judge in the Cayman Islands, she spent several weeks on the case before clearing Infantino of all seven charges, confirming that “no ethical violations” had been committed on his part.

Four of the seven charges relate to five private jet flights, two of them gifts from the Union of European Football Associations, “UEFA”.

Insiders told “The Telegraph” that FIFA officials felt, less than a year after Sepp Blatter’s suspension, that the organisation could not endure further turmoil at the top. There was no indication that any third party had swayed Allard in her decision to clear him.

Complaints from senior FIFA officials had sparked the investigation, and they extended to Infantino’s spending of the organisation’s money on personal items.

The expenses included six pairs of football boots, worth 942 pounds sterling, and an evening suit for an “IFAB” event worth 1,415 Swiss francs. On top of that came a sum of 2,000 Swiss francs per month, which senior FIFA officials received as an allocation for incidental expenses.

Salary and appointments

Infantino dismissed the proposed annual salary, worth 1.5 million pounds sterling in 2016, as “insulting”, and refused to respond to the payroll official’s messages about it.

He knew Blatter had been paid 3.6 million Swiss francs, around 2.7 million sterling at the time. When the investigation report landed in August 2016, Infantino had still not formally signed his FIFA employment contract. He is said to currently earn 4.4 million pounds sterling per year.

Protocols meant nothing when it came to appointing his inner circle. Among them were Mattias Grafström, the secretary general, Zvonimir Boban, and Luca Piazza, his friend from the Swiss village of Trélex.

Human resources received no job descriptions for the three. They had warned Infantino that the proposed salaries were “higher than what was usually paid” and outside the recruitment plan. Yet the Ethics Committee held human resources responsible for not informing Infantino of the procedures and policy, calling the matter “a compliance issue and not an ethical one”.

The Putin and Qatar flights

In April 2016, Infantino’s staff received orders to cancel commercial flight bookings to Moscow. Instead, Infantino, Grafström and Boban accepted seats on a private jet used by Vitaly Mutko, president of the Russian Football Union, who was organising the schedule of Infantino’s meetings with Vladimir Putin.

The Putin meeting ran late, and Infantino missed his commercial flight to Doha. So the Russians laid on another private jet, owned by a company affiliated with Gazprom, a FIFA sponsor at the time.

Once in Doha, another delay to the meeting with the Emir of Qatar prompted the Qataris to provide a private jet, which returned him to Geneva in time for an important meeting.

Allard cleared Infantino of any violation on all three flights, as well as on the outbound and return legs of a UEFA private jet between Geneva and Ljubljana in May 2016. The Code of Ethics barred the FIFA president from accepting gifts exceeding “trivial value”, and required him to refuse “in case of doubt”.

The Pope trip

After the 2016 UEFA Champions League final in Milan, Infantino boarded another private jet, this one owned by the Russian businessman Leon Semenenko, and travelled with his wife Leena Al Ashqar and his mother Maria to Rome.

He told the investigators the trip was a gift for his Italian mother, who had emigrated to Switzerland and run a newspaper kiosk for years.

During the meeting, Infantino presented Pope Francis with a special Adidas shirt and the Champions League winner’s medal. He had been invited in his capacity as FIFA president, yet he insisted the visit was “of a purely private nature”.

Allard cleared him of possible violations. Even so, she noted that he “could be considered not to have acted with complete integrity” because he mixed the official and private aspects and tried to change the nature of the visit.

The conflict with Scala

The complaints also exposed the strained relationship between Infantino and Domenico Scala, then chairman of the Audit and Compliance Committee. Scala resigned in May 2016 over the decision to grant the FIFA Council, effectively Infantino, the power to dismiss and appoint the heads of committees.

Allard took the view that FIFA’s regulations did not cover the case of a president refusing to sign a contract, so he could not be held responsible, even though the governance regulations stipulated that the Compensation Sub-Committee was responsible for setting the president’s salary.

Infantino told the FIFA Council in May 2016: “I did not sign a contract proposed to me by the chairman of the Audit and Compliance Committee. I did not accept this proposal. It was a proposal that I found insulting.”

The aftermath

Most of the FIFA officials who filed the complaints or gave testimonies later left the organisation.

According to “The Telegraph”, these were the first witnesses to Infantino’s style. The paper adds that his survival of the 2016 investigation and the removal of Scala marked an important step in consolidating the power he still wields.