Swiss Radio-Television revealed earlier this month that several major Swiss communities had borrowed money from FIFA. a legal process but which is controversial, while these same municipalities regularly criticize the world football organization.
Can you criticize FIFA on Monday and ask for money on Tuesday? In any case, this is what several large Swiss communities are doing, which have borrowed hundreds of millions of Swiss francs from the policeman of world football in recent years, while highlighting, for example, the aberrations of the organization of the World Cup in Qatar. .
If these loans, revealed by the RTS, are completely legal, they question. Why would a city borrow from an organization like FIFA rather than a bank? Simply because it costs less. For ten years that interest rates were negative, FIFA had taken the habit of making loans at 0 rates to communities. For the global organization, it’s always better than seeing its cash melt like snow in the sun in the bank. For cities, this also has advantages: no costs, no delays. This is how Geneva received 150 million Swiss francs from FIFA last year; Neuchâtel, 100 million; Lausanne, 40 million.
Communities rather on the left
However, Lausanne said no to fan zones during the World Cup in Qatar last summer. The city’s mayor, Grégoire Junod, admits that the message may be contradictory: “The controversy did not start from a dispute over the loan to FIFA, paradoxically. The controversy started from the fact that we were accused of having criticized the organization of the World Cup in Qatar and at the same time of practicing borrowings. Borrowings that have been practiced by very many Swiss communities. It is this contradiction that we are criticized for, and that I can understand.”
The case is all the more embarrassing as many of the communities which have taken out these short-term loans are classified on the left. On paper, they are therefore reluctant to sign contracts with an organization that collects corruption cases. But here again, Grégoire Junod defends a profitable choice for public finances. Especially since going through a bank would not have been much more ethical according to him: “When you invest money, you can choose to invest it in funds that offer guarantees on issues of armament, respect for working conditions, etc. When you borrow money, it is not Not possible.”
“If we borrow from a bank, we have no guarantee on the funds. We can say ‘we will never borrow from FIFA again’, there is a symbolic meaning to that. But in fact, we don’t there is no way to control the origin of the funds that we borrow.”
Grégoire Junod, Mayor of Lausanneat franceinfo
In the future, however, we will have to do without FIFA. With the end of negative rates and also, no doubt, because of the controversy, the policeman of world football has hinted that he will no longer play the lenders. The city of Bern is the one that will lose the most. Since 2017, it has received nearly two billion Swiss francs from FIFA.