Stefan Keller says his enquiries found there were "clear signs of criminally reprehensible behaviour" in relation to flight from Suriname to Geneva; FIFA and president Gianni Infantino say accusations are "baseless and ill-intentioned"
Thursday 10 December 2020 19:53, UK
A Swiss special prosecutor's demands for a criminal investigation over the use of a private jet by Gianni Infantino in 2017 have been described as "baseless and ill-intentioned" by FIFA and its president.
Stefan Keller said his enquiries had found that there were "clear signs of criminally reprehensible behaviour" in relation to the flight in 2017 from Suriname to Geneva.
A press statement on his website said he had passed the case on to the Swiss federal prosecutor's office.
FIFA and Infantino issued a statement later on Thursday outlining their intention to take "all necessary legal steps".
It read: "Many months into his investigation and having established precisely nothing problematic about these meetings with the former Federal Attorney General, as FIFA always predicted would be the case, and having not even asked to hear the FIFA President since his investigation was announced last July, the "special prosecutor" has issued an official "media release" saying that the FIFA president should now be investigated for something else!
"Neither FIFA nor its president have ever been informed of these new spurious allegations and they are therefore unable to comment on them, which is probably the intention of the "special prosecutor".
"The method of 'special prosecutor' Stefan Keller to accuse and defame by publishing media releases without justification borders on character assassination and is rejected in the strongest possible terms by FIFA and its president.
"FIFA and its president will obviously take all necessary legal steps and remedies to put an end to these baseless and ill-intentioned accusations."
FIFA's ethics committee said in August that it was closing its investigation into the matter due to "the evident lack of a prima facie case regarding any alleged breach of the FIFA code of ethics".
Keller passed on the case concerning the flight because his mandate is to look at meetings between Infantino and Switzerland's former attorney general Michael Lauber.
Criminal proceedings were opened against Infantino in relation to those meetings on July 30 of this year after Keller concluded there were "indications of criminal conduct".
Infantino and FIFA dismissed any suggestion of wrongdoing in relation to his meetings with Lauber, saying he had met prosecutors all around the world in relation to ongoing criminal cases in which FIFA was assigned victim status in regard to alleged corrupt activity at the world governing body prior to his election as president in 2016.
Speaking in early August, FIFA's deputy general secretary Alasdair Bell said: "There is something a little bit grotesque and unfair about all this because we are 100 per cent confident that there will never be a criminal charge, far less a criminal conviction against the FIFA president.
"But we have a situation, and we have to acknowledge this, where objectively there is damage to both FIFA and to the FIFA president simply because of the existence of this criminal investigation and we think that's not right."
