Second Circuit judge appears befuddled by overturned convictions in Brooklyn FIFA bribery case

MANHATTAN (CN) — Federal prosecutors for the Department of Justice asked the Second Circuit on Wednesday to reinstate the convictions of a former Fox media executive and an Argentine-based sports marketing group, who were found guilty at trial in 2023 of a sprawling bribery scheme involving international soccer.

Hernan Lopez, the former CEO of Fox International Channels, alongside the company Full Play Group S.A., were convicted by a federal jury in Brooklyn for counts of wire fraud and money laundering conspiracies for bribing some of the biggest groups in the sport — including FIFA — for broadcasting rights to tournaments including the World Cup qualifiers and Copa América.

Prosecutors said the broadcast executives paid millions of dollars annually in bribes and kickbacks to the top soccer officials, which not only granted them the broadcasting rights they sought, but also insider information on bidding for other tournaments like the 2018 and 2022 World Cups.

But six months after the verdict, Barack Obama-appointed U.S. District Judge Pamela Chen overturned their convictions, citing fresh precedent in the U.S. Supreme Court that raised the bar for bribery prosecutions.

In doing so, Chen “frankly misread” the high court’s precedent, Assistant U.S. Attorney Kaitlin Farrell told a panel of circuit judges on Wednesday — one of whom appeared to seriously question why the convictions were tossed in the first place.

“The district court erroneously granted … acquittals on the basis of a new post-trial bright-line rule that the jury was never instructed on,” Farrell said. “That rule categorically excluded foreign commercial bribery from the ambit of the honest services statute.”

Farrell argued that the Supreme Court ruling on which Chen based the acquittals was not actually applicable to the case at hand. The ruling, Percoco v. United States , involved a former aide to former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who was convicted in 2018 of taking bribes to influence the Cuomo administration’s rollout of a billion-dollar economic project nicknamed the “Buffalo Billion.”

Percoco brought his conviction to the Supreme Court, which acquitted him after finding that the jury was given improper instructions when mulling the wire fraud conspiracy count. The high court also overturned a similar conviction that stemmed from the same investigation, this time for Cuomo donor Louis Ciminelli, on similar grounds.

But neither case, Farrell argued Wednesday, should have resulted in the acquittal of Lopez or Full Play, nor should they rule out “foreign commercial bribery” from the honest-services wire fraud statute as the lower court claimed.

“Neither case even dealt with private sector bribery, much less international bribery,” Farrell claimed.

Even if they did, Farrell added that the defendants’ fraudulent activity in the United States were “extensive,” based on the facts of the case.

“There were conspiratorial meetings in the United States, including here in New York, Miami and Los Angeles,” Farrell said. “One of the defendants was an American media executive for Fox, an American company.”

It was an argument that garnered sympathy from U.S. Circuit Judge John Walker, a George H. W. Bush appointee, who appeared puzzled by the lower court’s decision to test the bounds of honest-services wire fraud in this particular case.

“It’s not clear to me why the district court did what she did,” Walker said. “I think what she was trying to do was anticipate … if this case goes to the Supreme Court, what are they going to do? And I know from my own personal experience that that’s a ruinous course of action.”

Prosecutors are seeking a ruling from the circuit court that either reinstates the convictions or orders a new trial.

Joining Walker at the bench were U.S. Circuit Judges Beth Rohinson and Sarah Merriam, both Joe Biden appointees. The panel didn’t immediately issue a ruling following Wednesday’s arguments.

Corruption in world soccer has been a hot topic for the past decade after a U.S.-led probe became public in 2015, shining a light on hundreds of millions of dollars in bribes and payoffs that led to dozens of indictments and convictions.

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