Designer watches handed out to Fifa officials as gifts are to be handed over to fund a charity working on football projects in Brazil.
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Goodie bags gifted by the Brazilian Football Association to VIP attendees of a FIFA Congress in Sao Paulo ahead of the 2014 World Cup included Parmigiani watches worth $30,000 each.
He has not attended any FIFA Executive Committee meetings since May, when police raided a Swiss hotel and arrested nine football officials and five sports media and promotions executives in a landmark corruption investigation into the sport’s world governing body.
However, the ethics committee, which said a year ago it would not open formal proceedings against officials if they handed the watches over, said it had found only 48 were actually distributed, all of which have now been returned.
“I was not raised like that”, he said, declaring it was bad manners to return gifts and insisting he would instead establish the true worth of the watch and contribute the amount to a charity.
After ruling they were unauthorized gifts, Federation Internationale de Football Association ethics prosecutors decided against opening cases against officials who received a watch on the condition that they returned it.
The Parmigiani watches were ordered to be returned by the Ethics Committee two months after the conclusion of the tournament after they were deemed to be “inappropriately expensive”.
The watches will be given to an organization named streetfootballworld, “who will directly invest all resources generated through the sale of the watches into initiatives across Brazil that use football to drive social change”.
D’Hooghe said he had no idea about the value of the “poisonous gift” which was within a bag featuring promotional material about Brazil.
Many officials offered excuses of having donated the watches to charity, lost them or have given them away.
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“As a good Christian, I have to say that what the ethics commission is doing with me, it’s like an inquisition”, Blatter said.
