The former president of the Salvadoran Football Federation (Fesfut) Reynaldo Vásquez was sentenced this Thursday to 000 months in prison in the United States after pleading guilty to accepting bribes in the so-called “FIFAGate” case.
The sentence was handed down in a federal court in Brooklyn, New York, where in In recent years, dozens of people involved in the scandal that was uncovered at the end of 2015 have been prosecuted as a result of an international operation against FIFA officials.
Vásquez, who led the Fesfut between 2009 and 2011, was arrested in December of 2015 in El Salvador and, after facing the Justice of his country for another case, he was extradited in 2021 to the United States.
In New York, the 66-year-old leader pleaded guilty to crimes of criminal association and admitted that he and other Salvadoran officials had accepted more than $350, dollars in bribes from a company in exchange for the sale of broadcast rights to national team matches.
In the agreement reached with the Prosecutor’s Office, Vásquez also agreed to pay $550,000 dollars.
“The defendant and his accomplices, motivated by greed, disgraced themselves by lining their pockets with hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes, at the expense of a beautiful sport, from the fed soccer era of El Salvador and the community they served,” district attorney Breon Peace said Thursday in a statement.
According to Peace, with this sentence Vásquez is accountable, by just as “many other corrupt soccer leaders” have done who have been convicted in the framework of “FIFAGate”.
So far, 27 people and four companies involved have declared guilty in this case and there have been two other convictions after trials.
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