Washington, May 1 (ANI): Former president of the international football governing body FIFA, Joao Havelange, had resigned as the honorary president following a World Cup bribery case that has tarnished the organization for more than a decade.
Stating that Havelange had resigned on April 18, a FIFA ethics court ruling said that the former president and his former son-in-law Ricardo Teixeira were guilty of 'morally and ethically reproachable conduct', CBS News reports.
The ruling noted that it was not a crime in Switzerland at the time for Havelange, Teixeira and then-South American football confederation president Nicolas Leoz to accept bribes between 1992 and May 2000.
However, the ruling further said that as football officials, Havelange and Teixeira should not have accepted any bribe money, and should have had to pay it back since the money was in connection with the exploitation of media rights
According to the ruling, the conduct of both Havelange and Teixeira pre-dated FIFA's current ethics code, which came into force in 2012, after Teixeira resigned from as a FIFA board member.
The report mentioned that the payments attributed to the accounts connected to Havelange and Teixeira had totaled almost 22 million dollars from 1992-2000.
However, current FIFA President Sepp Blatter was cleared of any wrongdoing in the case, which involved millions of dollars in kickbacks from World Cup contracts marketed by the ISL agency, which collapsed into bankruptcy in 2001, the report added. (ANI)
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