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(CN) — The Supreme Court on Monday tossed criminal charges against a former Fox media executive and an Argentine sports marketing group, who were found guilty at trial in 2023 of a sprawling bribery scheme involving international soccer.
The high court’s order — which comes a month after federal prosecutors abandoned the case — vacates and remands a Second Circuit decision from last year that reinstated the guilty convictions against Hernan Lopez, the former CEO of Fox International Channels, and the company Full Play Group S.A.
A federal jury in Brooklyn convicted Lopez and Full Play on counts of wire fraud and money laundering conspiracies for bribing FIFA and other soccer groups for broadcasting rights to tournaments like the World Cup qualifiers and Copa América. But six months after their verdict, Barack Obama-appointed U.S. District Judge Pamela Chen overturned their convictions, citing fresh Supreme Court precedent that raised the bar for bribery prosecutions.
The Second Circuit deemed Chen’s ruling erroneous last summer, reinstating the convictions and rejecting Chen’s finding that foreign commercial bribery isn’t covered under a federal law defining a “scheme or artifice” to deprive someone of honest services.
Following that ruling, Lopez’s trial attorney vowed to appeal to the Supreme Court, saying in a statement on July 2, 2025, that he has “no doubt that our client will eventually be fully vindicated.”
That vindication came Monday via a brief docket update from the high court, granting petitions for a writ of certiorari from both Lopez and Full Play. But it was hardly a surprising conclusion, considering prosecutors in the Eastern District of New York elected to toss the case altogether in December.
“The government has determined in its prosecutorial discretion that dismissal of this criminal case is in the interests of justice,” Joseph Nocella Jr., the U.S. attorney for the district, wrote in a letter to Chen on Dec. 9.
Reports circulated after the filing that the Justice Department’s solicitor general, John Sauer, ordered Nocella to drop the convictions, potentially jeopardizing dozens of additional corruption cases surrounding international soccer and hundreds of millions of dollars already recovered in penalties.
Attorneys for Lopez didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment following the Supreme Court order. A lawyer representing Full Play declined to comment.
The 2023 convictions were complicated by the Supreme Court’s ruling later that year in *Percoco v. United States,*a case involving a former aide to ex-New York Governor Andrew Cuomo who was convicted of taking bribes to influence the administration’s rollout of a billion-dollar economic project nicknamed the “Buffalo Billion.”
The aide, Joseph Percoco, was found guilty in 2018. But he was eventually acquitted by the Supreme Court, which ruled the jury was given improper instructions for 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.
In its now-defunct ruling, a Second Circuit panel found neither case should have justified the acquittal of Lopez or Full Play.
“Intellectually curious jurists, and certainly law professors, can debate whether Percoco and Ciminelli ‘signal[ed] limits on the scope of the honest services wire fraud statute,’” ruled a trio of Second Circuit judges. “But in adjudicating the case before us, we must focus on the concrete holdings of the cases that currently bind us rather than on ‘signals’ that may forecast future decisions.”
The written ruling echoed the skepticism expressed by the panel in oral arguments months prior, when U.S. Circuit Judge John M. Walker Jr., a George H.W. Bush appointee, said, “It’s not clear to me why the District Court did what she did.”
“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,” Walker continued.
For further review, the case will now head back to the Second Circuit, which will additionally have to reckon with the newfound dismissal motion from the government.
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