What a tangled web we weave!
Less than 6 weeks ago, Gianni Infantino ascended to the post of FIFA president on the promise of a new era of transparency. It looks like he’s been tackled even before touching the ball. The extraordinary leak of a huge tranche of documents known as the Panama Papers have led to questions of his own involvement with shady offshore deals. As the head of UEFA’s legal services, Infantino approved the contract between UEFA’s marketing team and a subsidiary of Full Play Group owned by Hugo Jinkis, now under house arrest in Argentina for bribery and kickbacks involving football executives to secure lucrative media and marketing rights.
The Panama Papers gives details on Jinkis’s subsidiary Cross Trading obtaining the Ecuadorian rights to the Champions League, UEFA Cup, and Super Cup on three year contracts from 2003 to 2006 and then from 2006 to 2009. Cross Trading immediately sold those rights to media company Teleamazonas for three times the price. The question is whether Infantino knew of this arrangement and did he or any other UEFA official profit from this souped up deal.
Jinkis is a central figure in the FIFA corruption scandal which brought down Sepp Blatter and Michel Platini, his would be successor. Jinkis and his son Mariano, owners of Full Play Group SA, were named in the US Department of Justice indictments which alleged bribery, fraud, and money laundering on the part of 9 FIFA officials and five sports marketing executives. Cross Trading was set up in the tiny Pacific island of Niue before relocating to Nevada in 2009.
FIFA’s ethics committee have not said anything about opening an investigation into Infantino’s involvement but they are investigating one of their own officials, Uruguay’s Juan Pedro Damiani, a sitting member of the ethics committee and his association with Eugenio Figueredo, named in the DOJ’s indictment and a former FIFA vice president and head of the Uruguayan Football Federation. The Panama Papers names him as the lawyer who provided legal assistance to set up several of Figueredo’s offshore accounts. Damiani’s law firm also did business with Jinkis and his company Cross Trading at Niue as well as Nevada corresponding with Mossack Fonseca, the Panama law firm that is the source of this unprecedented data leak on individuals and corporations offshoring companies for tax havens and evasion.
The problem is there are too many bad apples still left over in FIFA and questionable associations involving them such as this will continue to be uncovered to ever give any meaning to “a new era.”