The Fifa case: American justice at work as the world’s CCTV system

‘In matters of criminal justice,’ said NatWest Three defendant David Bermingham after a London court extradited him and his co-defendants to face Enron-related US fraud charges even though nothing they were accused of looked like a crime under UK law, Britain was becoming ‘the 51st state of America’. Many Swiss citizens must have felt they were living in the 52nd when Department of Justice agents decided, as I put it in 2013, to ‘topple a whole bowling alley of gnomes of Zurich’ in an assault on Swiss banking secrecy that forced the closure of the country’s oldest bank, Wegelin. The catalogue of US fines imposed on non-US banks for money-laundering, sanctions-busting and market manipulation has added to the impression that Washington draws its own boundaries at will.

This long arm of US justice — sometimes, as I have observed, seeming to act as an instrument of US foreign policy, and unmatched by reciprocity for others chasing suspects on US soil — has been a troubling feature of world affairs ever since the Bush administration first started flexing muscles. It has become, in effect, the world’s CCTV system. When it operates intrusively outside US territory, we resent it as an infringement of national rights. When it captures wrongdoing to which other national and international authorities have been turning a blind eye, as seems to be the case with Fifa, we feel grateful that, in this respect at least, America is still the leader of the free world.

A global game

Football, like banking, is a global game — and the defence most frequently offered for overpaid bankers is that they are not as overpaid as footballers. In that sense, because football is such a potent focus of aspiration in poorer parts of the world, it is all the more important that the game should offer clean role models.