FIFA judge faces ethics investigation over offshore accounts

A FIFA judge, who helped ban Sepp Blatter for financial misconduct, is now under investigation by his ethics committee colleagues after being named in an international probe of offshore accounts.

The FIFA ethics prosecution chamber said yesterday that it “opened a preliminary investigation to review the allegations” linked to lawyer Juan Pedro Damiani of Uruguay.

Damiani was identified in reports on Sunday by international media, who received a vast trove of data and documents leaked from a law firm based in Panama.

The firm, Mossack Fonseca, specializes in creating offshore accounts, which can be used to avoid tax.

He heads his family’s legal and accountancy practice in Montevideo founded by his late father, Jose Pedro Damiani.

The FIFA case against Damiani was opened in March after ethics judges learned of his “business relationship” with former FIFA vice-president, Eugenio Figueredo, a fellow Uruguayan, who was arrested in Zurich almost 10 months earlier.

Figueredo was indicted by American federal prosecutors last May, and later extradited to Uruguay. In December, Figueredo pleaded guilty to fraud and money laundering charges and acknowledged taking bribes.

Damiani was a founding member of the FIFA ethics committee in 2006. He was proposed by the South American soccer body, CONMEBOL, and approved by the FIFA executive committee chaired by then-president Blatter.