Any spending from the new account, the World Football Remission Fund, will be subject to oversight and independent audit measures, American authorities said.
The money will be held in the U.S. bank system instead of in Switzerland, where FIFA has its headquarters, according to the terms of the agreement, which were described by two people familiar with the arrangement who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the details publicly.
Parameters for spending money recovered from the government have figured into other corruption cases, like the United Nations oil for food case, in which the Justice Department specifically designated restitution money for a development fund in Iraq.
“It’s not unprecedented to have the Justice Department weigh in on the appropriate use of the money,” Antonia M. Apps, a lawyer with Milbank, Tweed, Hadley McCloy and a former federal prosecutor for the Southern District of New York, said. “The scale of this corruption case is much larger than your typical corruption case, so the dollars are greater than you would normally see.”
As American authorities announced their case in 2015 and dozens of powerful officials and marketing executives pleaded guilty to charges including racketeering, wire fraud and money laundering conspiracy, prosecutors made clear they saw the soccer organizations as victims that had been co-opted by dishonest operators.
Lawyers for FIFA and the regional confederations were quick to embrace that view, and fought further to manage the perceptions of prosecutors and the public by seeking to distance the organizations from the accused criminals, both by cooperating with the authorities and to solidify the sports organizations’ role as victims, powerless to their top leaders’ fraud.
In a court filing in 2016, lawyers for FIFA argued that the organization had lost at least $28 million paid to 20 soccer officials over 12 years, along with having suffered other incalculable costs.

Source: New York Times

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