FIFA’s ethics watchdog wants Michel Platini banned for life over a suspect payment, the UEFA president’s lawyer said yesterday.
Platini, until recently the favourite to take over football’s world body, and FIFA president Sepp Blatter will find out in the next month whether a FIFA court has found them guilty of ethics breaches.
“The investigatory chamber of FIFA’s ethics committee has asked for Michel Platini to be banned for life. It is in the report sent to us,” the Frenchman’s lawyer, Thibaud d’Ales, told AFP.
He called the proposed punishment a “scandal” and “excessive”.
Blatter’s lawyers did not answer questions about whether the same punishment had been requested against the 79-year-old veteran sports baron.
His personal spokesman, Klaus Stoehlker, said Blatter did not know what punishment had been requested.
Platini and Blatter are already serving 90-day suspensions while an investigation is held into a $2 million (1.8 million euros) sum Platini received from FIFA in 2011.
That has ruled the 60-year-old Frenchman out of the race for the FIFA presidency to be decided in the election on February 26.
