BERN: Sepp Blatter has secured another victory over the Swiss judicial system according to Le Monde.

The French newspaper is reporting that the Swiss public prosecutor’s office has decided to drop a criminal investigation against the former FIFA president over the awarding of a World Cup television contract to Jack Warner.

On Friday Blatter and former UEFA president Michel Platini were cleared of fraud charges over the payment by FIFA to the Frenchman of 2m Swiss francs for work he had undertaken a decade earlier for the world football federation.

Le Monde quoted a prosecutor’s office statement as saying: “We confirm that the MPC has communicated to the parties that it considers the criminal investigation to be complete and ready to be closed and that it intends to close the procedure concerning this set of facts.”

This latest statement concerns a $1m loan made by FIFA to the Trinidad & Tobago federation which was then under the control of Jack Warner.

An earlier case dropped concerned a 2005 contract in which the also Warner-controlled Caribbean Football Union bought broadcast rights to the 2010 and 2014 World Cups for $600,000. The Trinidadian, at that time CFU’s president, sub-licensed those rights to his own Cayman Islands-registered company J & D International (JDI) which sold them in due course to Jamaica-based SportsMax for $19m.

Thus the original sale was and only around three per cent of subsequent market value.

Warner, at the time a FIFA vice-president, is currently fighting extradition to the United States from Trinidad & Tobago over charges raised in the long-running FIFAGate scandal.

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