A US jury on Tuesday acquitted a “thrilled” former Peruvian soccer boss at the FIFA corruption trial, clearing him to jet home while two convicted codefendants await sentencing from behind bars.
The panel cleared 60-year-old Manuel Burga, a former head of Peru’s soccer federation and ex-FIFA development committee member, on one count of racketeering conspiracy on the seventh day of deliberations in New York.
The jury returned the verdict following the Christmas holiday after convicting former Brazilian Football Confederation president Jose Maria Marin and former Paraguayan Football Association president Juan Angel Napout on Friday last week. They were previously deadlocked on Burga.
The Peruvian was arrested in 2015, when the US unveiled the largest graft scandal in world soccer, indicting 42 officials and marketing executives, as well as sports company Traffic, with corruption crimes totaling more than US$200 million.
However, more than two-and-a-half-years later, a bribery trial opened in a Brooklyn federal court with only three defendants in the dock — one of whom now walks free.
While the trial exposed systemic corruption at the heart of the world’s most popular sport, the US federal prosecutors’ case against Burga collapsed.
Prosecutors conceded that Burga never received bribery money, despite contending that he agreed to. Extradited to the US from Peru last year, he was scheduled to be reunited with his family in Lima yesterday.
“I am returning to my country, I have lots to do there. I have no feelings of vengeance or revenge,” Burga said as he left the federal courthouse in Brooklyn, in comments broadcast by Peruvian TV.
“From now on, I am only looking ahead,” he said.
Looking frail and emotional, he turned to his faith.
“God enlightened the jury to deliver the verdict I have been hoping for for two years and 22 days,” he added.
Lawyer Bruce Udolf said his client was “thrilled to be able see his family after two years of this ordeal” and thanked the jury for reaching “the right result.”
“There was no evidence that he received any money at all. In fact, the government didn’t even contend that he had,” Udolf told reporters.
At trial, prosecutors accused Burga of intimidating a key witness, Alejandro Burzaco, by twice drawing a finger across his neck in a throat-slashing gesture while the Argentine — who pleaded guilty — testified.
Udolf said his client had scratched his neck, but US District Judge Pamela Chen thought otherwise and on Nov. 15 restricted his telephone and computer access.
The trial lifted the lid on the life of privilege, luxury and excess enjoyed by members of FIFA’s executive committee: personal chauffeurs, private jets, the “presidential treatment,” luxury hotels, meetings in idyllic resorts in the Bahamas or Mauritius, and even cruises on the Danube for wives, children and grandchildren.
The government amassed 30 million pages of evidence, saying that 85-year-old Marin and 59-year-old Napout were blinded by greed into accepting more than US$17 million in bribes.
The formerly powerful pair, convicted of racketeering conspiracy and related charges, were taken into custody on Friday and face at least 10 years in prison.
They “have been brought to justice, like the others who have been convicted for corrupting a sport beloved across the world, and will face punishment for their criminal conduct,” Acting US Attorney Bridget Rohde said on Tuesday.
“The guilty verdicts and the evidence at trial highlight the extent of the corruption and the continuing need for reform,” she added.
There is no date set for their sentencing and their lawyers have vowed to fight to absolve the pair.
Twenty-four of the 42 individuals indicted in May 2015 have cut deals in return for guilty pleas — two of whom have already been sentenced by Chen.
Another 15 remain in their own countries, including Brazilian Football Confederation president Marco Polo del Nero, who was this month banned from soccer for 90 days.
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