KEIR RADNEDGE REPORTS: The family of former FIFA president Sepp Blatter has said the 84-year-old Swiss spent a week in an induced coma after undergoing heart surgery in December.
Blatter, who also tested positive for Covid-19 at the end of last year, has now been transferred out of the intensive care unit of a Swiss hospital.
His daughter, Corinne Blatter Andenmatten, said: “Doctors are satisfied with his condition but there is still a long way to go. It was the most difficult and sad Christmas of my life.”
Blatter has been under criminal investigation by Swiss federal prosecutors since 2015, and for health reasons he has not yet been told that FIFA filed a new criminal complaint against him last month, his daughter said, in connection with the funding of the World Football Museum in Zurich.
At least local media has reported that another of the cases against Blatter has been shut down.
Last year investigators closed an investigation into a controversial contract signed in 2005 with the Caribbean Football Union that saw TV rights passed on to disgraced former FIFA vice-president and CONCACAF president Jack Warner.
Federal prosecutor Thomas Hildbrand is now understood to have closed an investigation concerning a private jet taken in 2007 by Warner and allegedly paid by FIFA in the sum of $365,000.
Blatter’s health collapsed after he was suspended for ultimately six years in the wake of revelations in 2015 about multiple financial scandals within the leadership of world football.
###########