A FIFA judge who helped ban Sepp Blatter for financial misconduct is now under an investigation conducted by his ethics committee colleagues. The probe was initiated after Juan Pedro Damiani was named in an international probe of offshore accounts.
According to BRISTOL Herald Courier, the FIFA ethics prosecution board stated on Monday that it "opened a preliminary investigation to review the allegations" in connection with the lawyer Juan Pedro Damiani of Uruguay. The FIFA judge was identified in reports by the international media on Sunday who obtained an immense trove of data and documents leaked from a law firm based in Panama.
The said firm, Mossack Fonseca, specializes in making offshore accounts, which can be utilized to avoid tax. Damiani operates his family's legal and accountancy practice in Montevideo founded by his late father, Jose Pedro Damiani.
INQUIRER reported that the FIFA court case against Damiani was initiated in March after the ethics judges discovered his "business relationship" with the former FIFA vice president, Eugenio Figueredo. Figueredo is a fellow Uruguayan who was under arrest in Zurich almost months earlier.
He was prosecuted by the American federal prosecutors last May. Later on, he was extradited to Uruguay. In December, the ex-FIFA vice president pleaded guilty to fraud and money laundering charges and admitted taking bribes.
Just this December, FIFA's then-president Blatter identified Damiani as one of the four ethic judges who passed an eight-year veto on him for a few violations of the FIFA ethics code, including a financial conflict of interest. Blatter's ban was reduced to six years on an appeal, and he has filed a further challenge at the Court of Arbitration for Sport.
The FIFA judging panel in Blatter's case was chaired by Eckert. He was the one who referred the claims linked with Damiani to the current FIFA chief prosecutor Cornel Borbely.
Separately, the suspended UEFA president Michel Platini stated after he was named in the leaked documents, that all his accounts and assets are known to Swiss tax authorities. Le Monde newspaper, which accessed the leaked documents, claimed that Platini has an offshore company founded in Panama in 2007 and named it Balney Enterprises Corp., as noted by THE BIG STORY.
Meanwhile, Damiani is the current president of Penarol, which is considered as one of Uruguay's two most popular teams alongside Montevideo rivals Nacional. Despite the ethics probe, Damiani remains as a member of the judgement chamber.
