South American Football Confederation president Juan Angel Napout said the group would vote “as a block” for Infantino at the February 26 election for a successor to Sepp Blatter, head of the scandal-tainted FIFA.
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During a FIFA congress organized on the eve of last year’s World Cup in Brazil, the Brazilian confederation distributed watches to football officials including members of FIFA’s executive committee.
Sarney is the son of a former Brazilian president and one of the CBF’s four vice-presidents.
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.
The 79-year-old along with his UEFA counterpart Michel Platini are serving a 90-day provisional ban handed by FIFA’s ethics committee over claims that the latter had received a “disloyal payment” of 1.35 million pounds from the outgoing president in 2011.
However, Andreas Bantel, spokesman for the Ethics Committee, told Reuters Thursday.
Of the 65 watches only 48 have been returned, but they have now been donated to the streetfootballworld charity, which plans to plow the proceeds of their auction into Brazilian soccer projects.
Del Nero, who was in Zurich at the time of the arrests, returned to Brazil just hours later and has not left the country since.
Blatter, reiterating comments he had made previously on the matter, said contracts could be done in writing or orally.
Federation Internationale de Football Association earlier said that the Brazilians obtained the watches from Parmigiani for $8,750 each.
It said that once all potential recipients had been contacted, 48 watches were handed over.
The watches were found to have a market of value of £16,000 and had to be returned if the officials involved wanted to avoid disciplinary action when it was found the gifts were unauthorised according to Fifa’s code of ethics.
“In 1998, when he was done with the World Cup, I needed him to work for me”.
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Asked where it was stated in FIFA statutes that the president is not a FIFA official, Blatter said: “When you look at the definition in the statutes, it says I’m not a FIFA official”. “I am an honourable man”.
