CROOKED Fifa chief Julio Grondona asked for another £60million — after not being bribed ENOUGH to deliver the 2022 World Cup to Qatar.
Argentine Grondona’s naked greed is being displayed in a New York courtroom as the full scale of the corruption scandal that brought down Sepp Blatter’s murky regime is unveiled.
Grondona, head of the Argentine FA from 1979 until his death at the age of 82 in 2014, was one of South America’s three voting members of the Fifa Council, alongside Brazilian Ricardo Teixeira and Paraguay’s Nicolas Leoz.
Alejandro Burzaco, former head of Argentinian media agency TyC, accused six major media companies of bribing Grondona for TV rights to the 2026 and 2030 World Cups.
And Burzaco told the court in Brooklyn: “Ricardo Teixeira, Nicolas Leoz and Julio Grondona received money in relation to the election of Qatar as the venue for the 2022 World Cup. I refer to the vote that took place in Switzerland.
“I was called to see Grondona in Buenos Aires in January 2011.
“He had a telephone conversation with Teixeira, and when he hung up he told me that the million dollars that we owed Teixeira (for other bribes) we had to give him.
“Grondona explained that Ricardo Teixeira owed him a million dollars because he had voted for Qatar to host the 2022 World Cup.”
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Burzaco added: “I was with Grondona at the Copacabana Palace Hotel in Rio de Janeiro and he met a group of Qataris, whom I had never seen.
“Grondona apparently knew them and started to insult them and complain, telling them he had been accused in Argentina of taking $80million (around £60m) to vote for Qatar.
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“Basically Grondona told them: ‘Either they pay me the $80million or send me or the authorities a letter saying that they never paid me a bribe’.
“He was very angry and anxious, saying that Teixeira and (former Barcelona president) Sandro Rosell had cheated Leoz and him — because they got into this scandal for only $1.5m and they kept the remaining $75m.”
The shocking revelations came during the trial of three former high-ranking Fifa officials, Brazilian Jose Maria Marin, Manuel Burga of Peru and Paraguayan Juan Angel Napout.
The trio are accused of taking millions of pounds in bribes after a long-running FBI corruption probe.
Burzaco told the court he paid £8m in bribes to the three defendants and promised another £15m.
He has also said media giants Globo of Brazil, Mexico’s Televisa and their partner Torneos and Fox Sports in the USA had combined to pay a £12m bribe to Grondona for World Cup rights.
Argentine Burzaco handed himself in to the US authorities in 2015, has pleaded guilty to corruption charges and is now a prosecution witness.
But his evidence was interrupted when Burga, 60, the former president of Peru’s FA, made throat-cutting gestures towards him from the dock.
Judge Patricia Chen changed Burga’s bail conditions, placing him under restricted house arrest in Brooklyn. The trial is expected to last months.
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