THE FORMER secretary of the Slovak Football Association (SFZ), Vladimír Wänke, will go to prison. The Supreme Court confirmed the verdict of the Special Court in Pezinok from April 7, 2009, which sentenced Wänke to three years and four months in prison for soliciting a bribe. Wänke was also given a €2,000 fine.
Both the defendant and the prosecutor appealed the initial verdict but the Supreme Court rejected both appeals on November 29, the SITA newswire reported.
Wänke was arrested on March 6, 2007 in his office at SFZ in Bratislava after accepting a Sk10,000 (about €330) bribe. Wänke had requested a so-called ‘revenue stamp’, allegedly a code name for a bribe, for speeding up registration of the transfer of a football player from an Austrian club to SK Eldus Močenok.
The key witness was the past owner of SK Močenok, Stanislav Szabó, who participated in the investigation as an agent provocateur, handing over the bribe and recording the entire meeting on a hidden camera.
Wänke was a long-standing chairman of the SFZ League Commission, sports director of the association, head of the SFZ Register and, since 2007, also acting secretary-general of the association.
