August 26 – Having reached a “deferred prosecution agreement”, Hugo and Mariano Jinkis have agreed to admit they paid millions in bribes to obtain lucrative media rights to major football tournaments.
The father and son team from Argentina will admit to paying “tens of millions of dollars in commercial bribes” to South American officials in exchange for television and sponsorship rights to the Copa America tournament, among others, according to US prosecutors.
The terms of the deal were not disclosed, though they are expected to be released on Thursday on bond.
The Jinkis’s were controlling principals of Full Play Group, a sports marketing agency based in Argentina. They received the media and marketing rights to the 2015-23 editions of the Copa America before a rival company Torneos joined Full Play.
Named in the first set of US Department of Justice FIFAgate indictments in 2015, the father and son remained fugitives in Argentina but recently travelled to the US in a secret plea deal with federal prosecutors.
A prosecution agreement allows criminal charges to be dropped when certain conditions are met.
They should avoid jail time – unlike some of the officials caught in the FIFAgate scandal that brought FIFA to its knees in 2015 with charges against executives and businesses spanning the globe.
The Jinkis’s were wanted on charges of conspiracy to commit the offenses of racketeering, wire fraud, and money laundering and turned themselves into Argentine police that year.
The case took investigators years to build, but the administration of US President Donald Trump and his Justice Department have been less committed to rooting out sports corruption.
The conviction of former Fox executive Hernan López for accepting bribes from Full Play was vacated in a Brooklyn court in May.
Contact the writer of this story at samindra.kunti@insideworldfootball.com
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