Top Swiss court confirms Platini ban

Geneva (AFP) – Switzerland’s highest court has rejected former UEFA chief Michel Platini’s appeal against a four-year suspension from football, ending his efforts to overturn the penalty, the ATS news agency reported Thursday.

Platini, 61, was hit with the penalty over a $2 million payment he received in 2011, authorised by then FIFA chief Sepp Blatter for work he did a decade earlier, with no contract to show for the deal.

Platini was initially hit with an eight-year ban by the FIFA Ethics Committee in late 2015, at the height of an unprecedented scandal that upended world football, but his suspension was later cut to six years upon appeal.

Platini appealed his suspension to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), which in May 2016 chopped another two years off the suspension.

Switzerland’s Federal Court has ruled that the ban is justified and that four years is not an unreasonable length of time, ATS reported.

Blatter, who was also slapped with a six-year ban, and Platini were the most prominent casualties of the massive scandal that rocked the world of football, and which ended Platini’s aspirations to take over the helm of FIFA.