Former Nicaraguan football boss charged with money laundering in new Fifa scandal

Fifa official Julio Rocha has been charged with money laundering and corruption in Nicaragua. The former head of the Nicaraguan Football Federation was arrested and detained in Switzerland during a raid on a Zurich hotel in May and is expected to be extradited to his homeland soon.

Reuters/Ruben Sprich

Charges against Rocha were filed in Nicaragua on 4 August, said prosecutor Julia Guido. It is alleged that hesigned a broadcast rights agreement with a company who gave him a 90,000-euro bribe.

Last week he agreed to be extradited to Nicaragua, Swiss officials said.

The US has also demanded the Nicaraguan’s extradition as part of its investigation into corruption at the world football governing body.

A spokesperson for the Swiss justice ministry said last week that they would not extradite Rocha until the US agreed to put aside its request.

Rocha was a member of Nicaragua’s Olympic committee from 1997 to 2009 and then from 2012 was a development officer at Fifa.

Jeffrey Webb from the Cayman Islands, who was one of the other arrested officials, was extradited last month to the US.

The five other Fifa officials wanted by the US have not yet agreed to be extradited. All of them are from South America or the Concacef area of North and Central America and the Caribbean.

Seven arrests took place during a dawn raid on 27 May in Zurich ahead of a congress of football’s governing body.

Meanwhile, Fifa president Sepp Blatter has criticised comments by Chung Mong-Joon, a candidate to secure Fifa’s top job.

Blatter said it was “disturbing” to hear the South Korean industrialist calling Fifa a “corrupt organisation”.

During a press conference in Paris on Monday, Chung had said Fifa had become corrupt “because the same person [Blatter] has been running it for 40 years”.

“Absolute power corrupts absolutely,” Chung said.

Blatter described Chung’s comments as “personal attacks” that were “particularly disrespectful to all concerned”.

Blatter, who was originally elected Fifa president in 1998, pointed out that Chung had been “Fifa vice-president and a Fifa Emergency Committee member for 17 years from 1994 up until 2011”.

At the launch of his campaign to succeed Blatter, Chung described a “profound crisis” over investigation into two corruption affairs at Fifa. He said that Uefa leader Michel Platini should not be a candidate for football’s top job because he was linked to Fifa’s past system.