Former Uefa President and French football captain Michel Platini was arrested on Tuesday in relation to an investigation into corruption surrounding the awarding of the Fifa World Cup to Qatar in 2022, a judicial official has confirmed.
The 63-year-old, once considered a protege of former Fifa president Sepp Blatter, is being held at the premises of the Anti-Corruption Office of the Judicial Police.
The office belongs to France’s main anti-corruption task force that serves as an extension of its Interior Ministry, according to French investigative website Mediapart.
Confirming the report, an official told AP that Platini was taken into custody on Tuesday as part of the investigation into the awarding of the tournament.
Claude Gueant, the former secretary general of the Elysee under former French president Nicolas Sarkozy, was also questioned by investigators as part of the probe but was not detained.
French financial prosecutors have been investigating the bidding process for the 2018 and 2022 World Cups and previously questioned former FIFA president Sepp Blatter.
Platini’s lawyer and adviser have declined to comment.
The nations’s financial prosecutor opened the investigation on the grounds of private corruption, criminal association, influence peddling and benefiting from influence peddling relating to the 2018 and 2022 World Cups, which were awarded to Russia and Qatar, respectively.
Platini was elected president of Uefa, Europe’s footballing body, in 2007 and served until 2015.
He was banned from the position by Fifa’s Ethics Committee after being found guilty of a series of ethical breaches.
He was banned from football for four years following the 2015 football corruption scandal, which was due to end shortly, after he was found to have arranged a $2 million backdated salary payment to Mr Blatter.
Platini told The New York Times last week that “I will be back” after his ban ends in October.
In the bidding for the 2022 World Cup, Platini voted for Qatar to host the tournament.
The small Gulf state was awarded the global event in December 2010. There has been much criticism from different corners of the football world about the country’s ability to host the tournament, which fields the world’s best 32 countries against one another.
Blatter, who was FIFA president at the time of the vote in 2010, blamed Platini for backing out of a secret “gentleman’s agreement” to award the 2022 tournament to the United States.
Platini told the AP in 2015 that he “might have told” American officials that he would vote for the United States bid.
However, he changed his mind after a November 2010 meeting, hosted by then-President Nicolas Sarkozy at his official residence in Paris and Qatar’s crown prince, now Emir, Tamin bin Hamad al-Thani.
Platini has long insisted that the meeting did not influence his vote for Qatar less than two weeks later.
“Sarkozy never asked me to vote for Qatar, but I knew what would be good,” he told the AP in 2015.
But Blatter claimed in a 2015 interview with the Financial Times that Platini told him ahead of the World Cup vote: “I am no longer in your picture because I have been told by the head of state that we should consider the situation of France.”
Both Platini and Blatter were toppled from their positions of power at the top of soccer in 2015.
Qatar’s methods to bring the World Cup to the Middle East for the first time have been subject to investigations by FIFA.
American attorney Michael Garcia found that some of Qatar’s conduct “may not have met the standards” required by FIFA but concluded there was no “evidence of any improper activity by the bid team.”
