A US jury has acquitted Manuel Burga, Peruvian former soccer boss at the FIFA corruption trial in New York.
A thrilled Burga quickly said he was jetting home to meet his family.
The panel cleared 60-year-old Burga, a former FIFA development committee member, on one count of racketeering conspiracy on the seventh day of deliberations in New York.
The jury returned the verdict following the Christmas holiday after convicting Jose Maria Marin, former head of Brazil’s Football Confederation and Juan Angel Napout, former head of Paraguayan football on Friday. They were previously deadlocked on Burga.
The Peruvian was arrested in 2015, when the United States unveiled the largest graft scandal in world soccer, indicting 42 officials and marketing executives, as well as the sports company Traffic, with corruption crimes totaling more than $200 million.
But more than two and a half years later, a bribery trial opened in a Brooklyn federal court with only three defendants in the dock — one of whom now walks free.
While the trial exposed systemic corruption at the heart of the world’s most popular sport, US federal prosecutors’ case against Burga collapsed.
Prosecutors themselves conceded that he never received bribery money, despite contending he agreed to. Extradited to the United States from Peru in 2016, he is now due to be reunited with his family in Lima on Wednesday.
“I am returning to my country, I have lots to do there. I have no feelings of vengeance or revenge,” Burga said as he left the federal court house in Brooklyn, in comments broadcast by Peruvian television.
“From now on, I am only looking ahead,” he said.
Looking frail and emotional, he turned to his faith. “God enlightened the jury to deliver the verdict I have been hoping for for two years and 22 days.”
Lawyer Bruce Udolf said his client was “thrilled to be able see his family after two years of this ordeal,” thanking the jury for reaching “the right result.”
“There was no evidence that he received any money at all. In fact the government didn’t even contend that he had,” he told AFP.
