Former Fifa chief “took bribes”

Former Fifa president Joao Havelange was paid huge sums in bribes by collapsed marketing company ISL, court documents have revealed.
Havelange received at least 1.5m Swiss francs (£986,000) and executive committee member Ricardo Teixeira at least 12.74m SFr (£8.4m).
The Swiss prosecutor’s report, published by Fifa, reveals the pair may have received up to 21.9m SFr (£14.4m).
They are the only two Fifa officials named in the report.
Switzerland’s supreme court ordered the release of the documents identifying which senior officials took millions of dollars in payments from ISL, Fifa’s marketing partner until it collapsed into bankruptcy.
The papers were released to five media organisations, one of which is the BBC, and detail the court settlement which closed a criminal probe of the ISL case in May 2010.
In November that year, the BBC’s Panorama programme alleged that three senior Fifa officials, including Teixeira, took bribes from Swiss-based ISL in the 1990s, although commercial bribery was not a crime in Switzerland at the time.
The documents concerning Havelange also revealed that officials repaid 5.5m SFr (£3.6m) to end the prosecution office’s investigation on the condition that their identities remain secret. (BBC)