Former FIFA secretary general Jerome Valcke has filed an appeal at the Court of Arbitration for Sport against his 10-year ban from football.
Valcke was found guilty by FIFA’s ethics committee of misconduct over the sale of World Cup tickets, abuse of travel expenses, attempting to sell TV rights below their market value and destroying evidence.
The Frenchman is being investigated by The Office of the Attorney General of Switzerland for “various acts of criminal mismanagement”.
Valcke played a major role in the latter years of Sepp Blatter’s tenure as FIFA president and is now looking to CAS to overturn the decade-long ban.
Swiss Blatter lost his appeal to CAS against a six-year ban by FIFA in December.
FIFA announced last January that Valcke had been sacked from his role – the second time he had been dismissed by the world governing body.
He had been suspended since September 2015 after ethics charges were brought against him over World Cup ticket sales, along with allegations over expenses including the use of a privately-hired FIFA jet for personal travel.
He was also sacked as a marketing director of FIFA in 2006 after a judge said he had lied repeatedly during FIFA’s botched sponsorship negotiations with rival credit-card companies MasterCard and VISA.
Less than eight months later, however, he was back in FIFA as second in command to president Blatter.
A statement released by CAS read: “Jerome Valcke, former secretary general of the Federation Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), has filed an appeal at the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) against the decision issued by the FIFA appeal committee dated June 24, 2016 (with reasons notified on February 3, 2017), in which he was banned from taking part in any football-related activity for a period of 10 years.
“Jerome Valcke seeks to have the challenged decision set aside in order for the sanction imposed on him to be lifted definitively. A CAS arbitration procedure is in progress.”
