Federal agents carry out boxes of evidence taken from the headquarters of the Confederation of North, Central America and Caribbean Association Football (CONCACAF,) on Wednesday in Miami Beach, Florida. (AP Photo)
BERN, Switzerland — For months, American and Swiss investigators worked in secret to prepare for the raids that would shake the soccer world.
They knew that the moment to strike would come when FIFA, the sport’s governing body, held its annual congress in Zurich, gathering all of its top officials — including the main suspects in a far-reaching US corruption probe.
Any leak could have given the game away, allowing international soccer officials to scramble out of Switzerland or time to destroy important evidence before authorities could seize it.
“It was a months-long planning. It was quite intense to try to find out what is the best moment,” Andre Marty, spokesman for the Swiss attorney general’s office, told The Associated Press late Wednesday, hours after he raids. “It was exactly today that most of the people of interest to the US investigation and to the Swiss investigation are still in Switzerland.”
The dual investigations have shaken FIFA, which has been dogged by corruption claims. FIFA president Sepp Blatter has sought to manage the allegations, going so far as to file a criminal complaint against “unknown persons” last November. That move followed then-FIFA ethics prosecutor Michael Garcia’s protest at how FIFA handled his investigation into wrongdoing during the votes to host of the 2018 and 2022 World Cup — which went to Russia and Qatar.
Marty insisted that FIFA wasn’t tipped off that law enforcement officials would strike on Wednesday, conducting dawn arrests at the luxury Baur au Lac Hotel and raiding FIFA’s Zurich headquarters to seize electronic and paper documents.
“It was quite important to have this coordination between the arrests on the one side for the American procedure, and the other side to get into FIFA and get all of the interesting data and information that we are looking for,” he said.
For their part, Swiss prosecutors decided to act after the complaint from FIFA was backed up by what Marty described as “rather interesting bank documents” that investigators had obtained in recent months.
“This led to the fact that we were convinced that we have to proceed with these criminal procedures,” he told the AP.
Prosecutors planned on Thursday to interview 10 members of the FIFA executive committee who were already members in 2010.