Fifa in disarray as Sepp Blatter and Michel Platini receive ethics committee suspensions

Fifa President Sepp Blatter and his possible successor, Uefa chief Michel Platini, have been provisionally suspended for 90 days by the global soccer body’s ethics committee.

The committee also handed out a 90-day suspension to Fifa Secretary General Jerome Valcke, who had already been put on leave by the soccer body, and banned former Fifa Vice-President Chung Mong-joon for six years and fined him 100,000 Swiss francs (HK$800,000).

“The grounds for these decisions are the investigations that are being carried out by the investigatory chamber of the ethics committee,” Fifa’s ethics committee said in a statement on Thursday.

Swiss prosecutors last month opened a criminal investigation into Blatter over a Caribbean World Cup TV rights contract he signed, and a 2011 payment of 2 million francs to Platini, whose status the Swiss attorney general has described as being between a witness and an accused person.