Sepp Blatter’s former right-hand man Jerome Valcke has failed in an attempt to have a 10-year ban from football overturned by the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), the Lausanne-based tribunal has announced.
Valcke worked under Blatter at FIFA from 2003 to 2015, spending the last eight years as the organisation’s secretary general.
But the 57-year-old Frenchman’s tenure ended in typically controversial fashion when he was suspended in September 2015 for a series of alleged breaches of FIFA’s code of ethics related to the resale of World Cup tickets, inflated travel expenses, bribery and failure to cooperate with investigators.
FIFA’s ethics committee found him guilty and originally gave him a 12-year ban in February 2016, which was reduced to 10 years by FIFA’s appeal committee in June 2016.
He was also fined 100,000 Swiss francs, around €86,143.
Valcke then took his fight to CAS in February 2017 and a hearing took place in October but the three-man panel, which included leading British QC Michael Beloff, confirmed the FIFA appeal committee ruling.
In a statement, CAS said: “The panel concluded that the offences found to have been committed by Jerome Valcke were cumulatively of a serious degree of gravity and that, therefore, the sanctions of a 10-year ban and fine of CHF 100,000 were wholly proportionate.”
Valcke’s defeat at CAS follows earlier failures to overturn FIFA bans by Blatter in December 2016 and ex-UEFA chief Michel Platini, once considered Blatter’s most likely successor, last summer.
PA
Sourse: breakingnews.ie
