Michel Platini loses CAS appeal against 90-day suspension from FIFA; says ‘I won’t appeal’

Michel Platini, the UEFA president provisionally banned over a £1.35m “disloyal payment” from his FIFA counterpart, Sepp Blatter, has failed in his bid to have his interim suspension lifted.

This is just as the embattled UEFA chief has said he will not appeal the ruling.

The Frenchman had hoped to be able to attend this weekend’s Euro 2016 draw in Paris after applying to the court of arbitration for sport against his original 90 day provisional ban. But the Cas ruled that the decision by Fifa’s ethics committee should stand ahead of a final ruling next week on the facts of the case.

The CAS did, however, caution Fifa against extending the provisional suspension beyond the current 90 days. Under its rules, the ethics committee could have added an extra 45 days to the ban, but the Cas panel said this would have been unfair to Platini. In the event, the argument is a moot one because the ethics committee has promised to deliver its verdict before Christmas.

Platini’s lawyer, Thibaud d’Alès, said his client was satisfied with the ruling. “Michel Platini notes with satisfaction that CAS partially granted his request when it demanded that Fifa not extend his ban. In substance, he is confident that his case is solid.”

Platini and Blatter, who is also suspended for 90 days, will next week attend a hearing in front of the Fifa ethics committee judge, Hans-Joachim Eckert, who will rule on whether the lifetime bans requested against both men by the investigatory chamber should be applied.

The interim 90-day suspensions were announced in September after Swiss police opened a criminal investigation against Blatter and questioned Platini as a “person between a witness and a suspect” over a £1.35m payment in 2011, .

Both parties said they had a gentleman’s agreement to pay the money as part of a deal over the remuneration Platini would receive to work as an adviser to the Fifa president between 1998 and 2002. Platini’s lawyers had hoped that a document they unearthed showing that a salary of 1m Swiss francs a year was rumoured to have been agreed at the time. But the case made by the investigatory chamber is understood to argue that Blatter and Platini struck a corrupt bargain and that the £1.35m payment was made in return for something.

It was made shortly before the Uefa congress in Paris in 2011, at a time when Blatter was seeking Platini’s support for the Fifa presidency in the face of a challenge from the Qatari Mohamed Bin Hammam.

Platini and Blatter have accepted there was no written contract for the payment, said to be related to work undertaken by the Frenchman as a special adviser to Blatter between 1998 and 2002, but have denied wrongdoing. Platini has claimed Blatter told him at the time that Fifa could not afford to pay him, despite the governing body making £78m over that four-year cycle, and did not want to break its wage structure.

Both Blatter and Platini have said they believed their verbal contract was legal under Swiss law. However, Swiss law places a five-year time limit on such payments. The fact that the payments did not feature in Fifa’s accounts is believed to form part of the case against them.

In addition to the alleged corruption, the charges are based on four other potential breaches: mismanagement, conflict of interest, false accounting and noncooperation with the ethics committee. The Swiss attorney general is investigating whether the £1.35m constitutes what is termed under the country’s law a “disloyal payment”.

The fate of the two men who were once the most powerful in world football has become part of the wider corruption crisis swirling around Fifa in a year when whole swathes of its senior executives have been arrested or suspended.

The ethics committee will meet next week in Zurich, with a decision expected to be announced any time from 19 December onwards. Even if both men escape a life ban, they are expected to be handed hefty suspensions of six to seven years.

While both men would have the last recourse of a further appeal to Cas, a lengthy ban would almost certainly signal the end of Platini’s hopes of re-entering the race to succeed Blatter. It would also bring the curtain down in ignominious fashion on Blatter’s 41 years at Fifa, robbing him of the chance to leave in the manner of his choosing at February’s extraordinary congress.