The former FIFA president and former UEFA president were acquitted for a second time on charges of fraud, forgery, mismanagement and misappropriation of two million Swiss francs of Fifa money in 2011.
Blatter, 89, gave little reaction listening to the verdict of three cantonal (state) judges acting as a federal criminal appeals court.
Sitting in the row in front of Platini, Blatter alternately tapped his fingers and held his left hand over his mouth.
Platini sat with his arms folded or rubbing his hands as he listened to a translator sitting beside him relating the court’s verdict in German into his native French.
The attorney general’s office in Switzerland had challenged a first acquittal in July 2022 and asked for sentences of 20 months, suspended for two years.
Blatter and Platini have consistently denied wrongdoing in a decade-long case that swung on their claims of a verbal agreement to one day settle the money in question.
Blatter approved Fifa paying the sum to France football great Platini in February 2011 for supplementary and non-contracted salary working as a presidential adviser from 1998 to 2002.
The latest win for Blatter and the 69-year-old Platini came exactly nine and a half years since the Swiss federal investigation was revealed and kicked off events that ended the careers of soccer’s most powerful men.
That September 2015 day in Zurich, police came to interrogate them at Fifa after an executive committee meeting when Platini was a strong favorite to succeed his one-time mentor in an upcoming election.
Though federal court trials have twice cleared their names, Blatter’s reputation likely always will be tied to leading Fifa during corruption crises that took down a swathe of senior football officials worldwide.
Platini, one of football’s greatest players and later Blatter’s protege in the sport’s politics, never did get the Fifa presidency he often called his destiny. (AP)
