Swiss authorities have searched more houses as a part of their criminal investigation into Germany’s successful bid for the 2006 FIFA World Cup with Urs Linsi, former general secretary of world football’s governing body, added to their list of suspects.
The latest developments come after the office of the Swiss Attorney General in September confirmed that it had opened criminal proceedings against German football great, Franz Beckenbauer and three other former German Football Association (DFB) executives in relation to the country’s World Cup bid.
Beckenbauer, a former vice-president of FIFA, led the bid and was then installed at the helm of the organising committee for the tournament. Earlier this year he was fined and warned by the adjudicatory chamber of the FIFA Ethics Committee for failing to cooperate with Michael Garcia’s investigation into the bidding process for the 2018 and 2022 World Cups.
Former DFB presidents, Theo Zwanziger and Wolfgang Niersbach, as well as fellow organising committee member, ex-DFB secretary general Horst Schmidt, were also placed under investigation. In July, the adjudicatory chamber of FIFA’s Ethics Committee handed a one-year ban to Niersbach.
The ban for the then FIFA Council and UEFA Executive Committee member, and vice-president of Germany’s World Cup Local Organising Committee (LOC), came after the Ethics Committee had originally sought a two-year suspension.
“The Office of the Attorney General (OAG) of Switzerland confirms that on 23 November 2016 it conducted house searches with the support of the Federal Office of Police (fedpol) at various locations in the German-speaking part of Switzerland,” the OAG said in an emailed statement reported today (Wednesday) by the Reuters news agency.
“The measures were carried out as part of the investigations relating to a payment of €6.7m ($7.1m) made in April 2005 by the German Football Association (Deutscher Fussball-Bund, DFB) to Robert Louis-Dreyfus.”
That payment which went via FIFA, according to German authorities, to the late Adidas chief executive Dreyfus, was a return of a loan made years earlier when Germany was bidding to host the World Cup. It has since been tied to payments to FIFA officials via the account of Beckenbauer, who has denied wrongdoing.
Earlier this year, the DFB commissioned a report into alleged irregularities surrounding the bid. The report, which was published in March, claimed that although there was no evidence of FIFA Executive Committee members being paid to vote for Germany, payments were transferred to at least one former FIFA official through a myriad of accounts involving several companies and individuals, including Beckenbauer.
According to the AFP news agency, the OAG today added that “a further suspect is Urs Linsi (pictured above),” who was FIFA secretary general from June 1999 to June 2007. It added that “the measures carried out on 23 November 2016 relate to Urs Linsi,” who until last week was serving as president of a small bank in Zurich.
Credit: Sport Business
