FIFA: Blatter, Valcke, Kattner awarded themselves $80M in 5 years

Deposed FIFA president Sepp Blatter, ex-secretary general Jerome Valcke, and former finance director Markus Kattner awarded themselves pay raises and bonuses totalling $80 million during their final years in office, FIFA lawyers revealed Friday.

The payments and contracts under suspicion are dated between 2007 and 2015, reports Rob Harris of the Associated Press. They detail the supplemented annual incomes and World Cup bonuses paid to Blatter, Valcke and Kattner, with an extension of the latter's contract at FIFA occurring four days after the initial U.S. indictments.

"The evidence appears to reveal a coordinated effort by three former top officials of FIFA to enrich themselves," said Bill Burck of U.S. law firm Quinn Emanuel, which FIFA has retained amid its corruption investigation.

The payments also appear to violate Swiss law, and the evidence obtained will be handed over to American and Swiss federal prosecutors for their continued examination of FIFA's widespread corruption.

This news comes a day after FIFA's Zurich headquarters were raided yet again.

The office of Switzerland's attorney general confirmed it had "carried out a search of world football's governing body's headquarters on (Thursday) with the aim of confirming existing findings and obtaining further information." The Associated Press reports the raid is related to the ongoing investigations into Blatter and Valcke. The documents and electronic data collected in the search will also be given to federal prosecutors in Switzerland and the U.S.

The raid followed reports that incumbent president Gianni Infantino had possibly committed an ethics violation when he requested an audio segment of a FIFA executive committee meeting be deleted, as revealed in an email exchange between two FIFA employees:

FIFA spokesperson Delia Fischer defended Infantino's apparent violations in a statement on Thursday:

The email exchange that makes mention of the deletion of audio files refers to a copy of the original audio file of the meeting that was improperly stored on a local drive.

This mention does not refer to the officially archived audio file. That file exists and is properly saved at FIFA.

For their roles in corruption and kickbacks at FIFA, Blatter and Valcke were suspended from all football activities for six and 12 years respectively. Kattner is still awaiting his punishment after being sacked in May over bonus payments.