NEW YORK (AP) \u2014 A former president of Honduras pleaded guilty to conspiracy charges on Monday, admitting that he solicited hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes in the wide-ranging FIFA soccer scandal over lucrative broadcast rights.<\/p>\n
Rafael Callejas, 72, who was a member of FIFA\u2019s television and marketing committee, entered the plea to racketeering conspiracy and wire fraud conspiracy in Brooklyn federal court.<\/p>\n
He also agreed to forfeit $650,000, payable within a year, for his role in a system so corrupt that hundreds of millions of dollars in illegal payments were made over the past quarter-century.<\/p>\n
\u201cI knew it was wrong for me to ask for and to accept such undisclosed payments,\u201d Callejas told U.S. Magistrate Judge Robert M. Levy.<\/p>\n
He said he distributed a significant portion of his bribes to delegates of the Honduran soccer federation so he could remain its president, a position he held from 2002 to last August.<\/p>\n
Callejas, who was president of Honduras from 1990 to 1994, will be sentenced Aug. 5. He could face up to 40 years in prison.<\/p>\n
Callejas said he abused his powerful position in the soccer world to award contracts to Media World, a Miami, Florida, sports marketing company that paid bribes through U.S. bank accounts to the foreign bank accounts of Callejas and a co-conspirator.<\/p>\n
In return, Media World received media and marketing rights to the Honduran national soccer team\u2019s home World Cup qualifier matches for the 2014, 2018 and 2022 World Cups, he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cBribe payments totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars were sent to a bank account I controlled,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Media World is affiliated with Spanish media company Imagina Group. An attorney for Imagina Group has declined to comment.<\/p>\n
Initial arrests in the case last May resulted in charges against 14 people, including seven top FIFA officials arrested at a Swiss hotel.<\/p>\n
His surrender came after 16 additional defendants, most from Central and South America, were charged in the fall in a second wave of the prosecution that focused on a generation of soccer leaders in South America, a bedrock of FIFA and World Cup history.<\/p>\n
In that crackdown, five current and former members of FIFA\u2019s ruling executive committee were arrested at the same Zurich hotel where the similar raid on FIFA officials occurred a half-year earlier.<\/p>\n
In all, about 20 soccer officials have been indicted on charges related to the U.S. investigation of corruption in the sport.<\/p>\n
The Justice Department has said that numerous guilty pleas in the case have resulted in agreements to forfeit over $190 million, and another $100 million has been restrained in the U.S. and abroad. The U.S. has sought to restrain assets in 13 countries.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
NEW YORK (AP) \u2014 A former president of Honduras pleaded guilty to conspiracy charges on Monday, admitting that he solicited hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes in the wide-ranging FIFA soccer scandal over lucrative broadcast rights. Rafael Callejas, 72, who was a member of FIFA\u2019s television and marketing committee, entered the plea to racketeering […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":107,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":4,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-18436","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18436","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/107"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18436"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18436\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18436"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18436"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18436"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=18436"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}