By Daily Sports on December 27, 2017

A US jury acquitted a "thrilled" Peruvian former soccer boss at the FIFA corruption trial on Tuesday, allowing him to jet home while two convicted co-defendants await sentencing from behind bars.

The panel cleared 60-year-old Manuel Burga, a former head of Peru's soccer federation and ex-FIFA development committee member, on one count of racketeering conspiracy on the seventh day of deliberations in New York.

The jury returned the verdict following the Christmas holiday after convicting Jose Maria Marin, former head of Brazil's Football Confederation and Juan Angel Napout, former head of Paraguayan football on Friday. They were previously deadlocked on Burga.

Burga was arrested in 2015, when the United States unveiled the largest graft scandal in world soccer, indicting 42 officials and marketing executives, as well as the sports company Traffic, with corruption crimes totalling more than $200 million.

But more than two and a half years later, a bribery trial opened in a Brooklyn federal court with only three defendants in the dock -- one of whom now walks free.

Prosecutors themselves conceded that Burga never received bribery money, despite contending he agreed to. His lawyer said Burga would now fly out of the United States on Tuesday and be reunited with his family in Lima, Peru on Wednesday.

"He is thrilled to be able to see his family after two years of this ordeal," defense lawyer Bruce Udolf told AFP by telephone. © AFP

•Photo shows Manuel Burga.

Source Daily Sports

Posted December 27, 2017

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