Gianni Infantino: FIFA gets special prosecutor Stefan Keller removed from probe into its president

FIFA has succeeded in its bid to have special prosecutor Stefan Keller removed
from an investigation into its president Gianni Infantino.

The Swiss federal court announced on Wednesday it had upheld Infantino’s complaint against Keller, who had been looking into meetings between the FIFA boss and Switzerland’s former attorney general Michael Lauber in 2016 and 2017.

FIFA took issue with four press releases from Keller’s office from December last year and February and March of this year, which concerned use of a private jet and were ruled to be outside of Keller’s strict mandate to investigate the
meetings.

A statement from the Complaints Court of Switzerland’s Federal Criminal Court on Wednesday said Keller had given “grounds for his disqualification” in issuing those releases.

FIFA described the first of those statements from Keller last December as “malicious and defamatory” and born out of “extreme bias”.

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The investigation into the meetings between Infantino and Lauber, which opened last July, will continue despite Keller’s recusal.

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.

FIFA released a statement on Wednesday welcoming the federal court’s decision, saying Keller’s comments “could not guarantee a fair process”.

“The court stated that by attempting to look into matters that had nothing to do with his mandate and then publicly raising his own personal suspicions about them without any objective justification, Mr Keller had clearly violated the
presumption of innocence and damaged the standing of the FIFA president, contrary to his personal rights protected under the law,” the statement read.

“The court underlined that for a public prosecutor to communicate distorting, injurious, misleading and factually incorrect information, as well as mere polemics and propaganda, is plainly inadmissible.”

FIFA said Keller had been ordered to pay Infantino’s costs of 5,000 Swiss francs (just under £4,000) to cover the costs of the proceedings.

“As previously and consistently communicated, both FIFA and the FIFA president are fully available to co-operate with the authorities, whether that concerns meetings that the FIFA president had with the former Attorney General of Switzerland, or anything else,” the statement concluded.

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