Switzerland steps up house searches for evidence of 2006 World Cup payments
Swiss authorities say their criminal investigation into Fifa has expanded and the former secretary general Urs Linsi is a suspect.
The case relates to Germany’s staging of the 2006 World Cup and a suspicious payment of €6.7m that went through Fifa in 2005, when Linsi was its top administrator.
The office of Switzerland’s attorney general says it conducted house searches relating to Linsi on 23 November “at various locations in the German-speaking part of Switzerland”.
Linsi left Fifa in 2007. The former Germany captain Franz Beckenbauer is already a criminal suspect, along with three other members of the World Cup organising committee. The complex trail of the 2005 payment linked Fifa, German organisers and Robert Louis-Dreyfus, the late former head of Adidas. Beckenbauer, who captained the West Germany team that won the 1974 World Cup and was coach when they won again in 1990, accepted responsibility for the DFB’s “mistake” in making the payment to Fifa in April 2005 but has always denied any votes were bought by bribes.