Jack Warner blasts US, FIFA suspect turns self in

Port of Spain, Jun 10: Fallen FIFA executive Jack Warner has said that US authorities would be unable to give him a fair trial, while an Argentinian businessman indicted in the soccer body’s sprawling corruption scandal handed himself over to Italian police. Warner, a former schoolteacher and Trinidadian ex-minister of national security at the heart of the criminal case engulfing football’s world body, is the subject of a US request to have him extradited from Trinidad.The 72-year-old said the United States is not the “appropriate jurisdiction” to handle the matter “fairly” and claimed America is trying to exact revenge because it tried but failed to lobby FIFA to host the 2022 World Cup.
“One must be extremely careful to question whether the United States can be fair in taking action against officials of an international body whom it feels has done it wrong,” Warner wrote in an editorial in the weekly Sunshine newspaper, which he owns.Currently, US prosecutors accuse 14 people of taking part in a sweeping kickbacks scheme going back 20 years involving a total of USD 150 million in bribes.