GENEVA (AP) — FIFA judges imposed life bans on two former soccer federation presidents for financial misconduct, including one who stayed in office since being sanctioned in 2011 as part of a notorious election bribery scandal in the Caribbean.
Montserrat’s long-time soccer leader Vincent Cassell was charged with “abuse of position, systemic conflicts of interest” and misuse of FIFA and federation funds, FIFA said in a statement on Friday.
The former president of the Maldives soccer federation, Bassam Adeel Jaleel, was expelled from the sport for “misusing FIFA Covid-19 Relief Plan funds for his personal benefit,” FIFA said. During the pandemic in 2020 FIFA said it would make up to $1.5 billion available in grants and loans.
Maldives media reported this year that Jaleel was sentenced to 23 years in prison for embezzling $1.2 million from FIFA. The money was intended for local soccer clubs and was reportedly used to buy apartments.
Cassell and his federation’s long-time general secretary, Tandica Hughes, pleaded guilty in a Montserrat court in April to tax evasion charges.
Both men also were prosecuted in 2011 by FIFA’s then-ethics committee in connection with Caribbean soccer officials taking $40,000 cash payments linked to Mohamed bin Hammam of Qatar during his failed campaign to challenge Sepp Blatter for the FIFA presidency.
Cassell and Hughes continued to run the Montserrat soccer body, which is currently entitled to get at least $2 million each year from FIFA’s World Cup profits. FIFA installed an emergency management team last February this year after they left.
The decision to oversee Montserrat's day-to-day management was due to “exceptional crisis and institutional paralysis,” FIFA cited in February.
Hughes was banned by FIFA judges for 15 years for “benefiting from and facilitating improper transactions,” abuse of position and misuse of funds.
Cassell also faced FIFA charges of “conduct affecting the physical and mental integrity of (federation) staff members,” and was fined 1 million Swiss francs ($1.23 million). It is unclear what authority FIFA has to get the money.
Hughes was ordered to pay 150,000 Swiss francs ($184,000), FIFA said.
Jaleel from the Maldives also was ordered by FIFA to pay 1 million Swiss francs. His verdict was announced more than two years after he was provisionally suspended from soccer by FIFA.
The Maldives federation’s former finance director, Mohamed Ageel, was banned from soccer for 10 years and fined 100,000 Swiss francs ($184,000).
FIFA said Ageel’s charges related to “facilitating and concealing misuse of FIFA funds, using falsified documentation and failing to cooperate” with the ethics investigation.
FIFA president Gianni Infantino visited the Maldives last year and acknowledged in a news release “the challenges that football in the Maldives has faced in recent years.”
Both Cassell and Jaleel, who was elected like Infantino in 2016, were presidents of their federations the next year during the FIFA congress in Bahrain. Infantino told his audience in a keynote speech in Manama, “We don’t want you,” if they were corrupt.
“If there’s anyone in this room or outside of this room who still thinks he can enrich himself,” Infantino said in 2017, “that he can abuse football, I have one clear and strong message to tell him: Leave football and leave football now.”
See AP’s full soccer coverage here
FILE - The FIFA logo is seen at the entrance of FIFA headquarters in Zurich, Switzerland, Aug. 6, 2026. (Andreas Becker/Keystone via AP, File)
WASHINGTON (AP) — In a defeat for the Trump administration, a federal court on Friday ruled that the Energy Department exceeded its authority when it forced a Michigan coal-fired power plant to stay open past its scheduled retirement date last year.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright had said the 64-year-old J.H. Campbell Generating Plant was needed to ensure reliable electricity in the region, and he used emergency powers to keep it operating. Environmental groups and three states — Michigan, Illinois and Minnesota — went to court to try to overturn orders keeping the plant online.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit sided with the states and the groups, saying there was no real emergency under the law.
The section of the Federal Power Act that allows emergency orders “is essentially a narrow, last-resort backstop," Appeals Court Judge Cornelia Pillard wrote for a unanimous three-judge panel. Use of emergency authority “is triggered only when there is a need for immediate, essentially last-resort action and the circumstances require action by DOE in particular, as opposed to action by the state or states responsible for resource adequacy," she added.
Reversing the Campbell plant's “long and carefully planned retirement" is "disruptive," Pillard wrote.
Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel said she was relieved the appeals court “threw out DOE’s order that had zero basis in reality.”
Nessel, a Democrat, said her office “has been fighting this unlawful political stunt at every turn, and this ruling proves what we have been saying all along: this administration does not get to invent fake emergencies to bypass the rule of law against the best interests of Michigan residents.”
The Michigan case is one of several legal disputes that have emerged across the country as the Trump administration uses emergency powers to force a half-dozen coal-fired plants to remain open.
Administration officials were undeterred by Friday's court ruling and just hours later Wright announced another emergency order to keep online a coal plant in Centralia, Washington. That plant, operated by TransAlta, had been scheduled to shut down at the end of 2025.
The orders, which also apply to plants in Indiana, Colorado, Florida and Washington state, are raising ratepayer bills and adding air and water pollution that could have been avoided, critics say. An oil and gas plant in Pennsylvania was also ordered to keep its turbines running as a hedge against electricity shortages in the mid-Atlantic grid.
President Donald Trump declared a national energy emergency in a January 2025 executive order, citing demand increases from artificial intelligence and data center growth.
An Energy Department spokesperson said the emergency orders — including at Campbell — “prevented blackouts and likely saved hundreds of lives during peak capacity events this past year,” especially severe winter storms in late January and early February.
At the peak of the storms, coal generation in affected regions increased by 25% compared to the previous year, spokeswoman Emily Matthews said. The Campbell plant provided over 650 megawatts — enough power for hundreds of thousands of homes — every day from Jan. 21 to Feb. 1, she said.
The Energy Department "will continue to protect and defend energy security for all Americans,” she said.
Keeping the Michigan plant open beyond its May 2025 retirement has cost about $259 million so far, according to new financial filings. Those losses will likely be paid by families and businesses in the Midwest, opponents of the order say.
Consumers Energy, which operates the Campbell plant, said it was reviewing the court ruling. In the meantime, the utility will keep the plant operating under terms of a recent DOE order that extends its directive through mid-November, spokesman Brian Wheeler said in a statement.
Ted Kelly, U.S. clean energy director at the Environmental Defense Fund, said the court ruling rejected the Trump administration’s nationwide effort to force “unreliable, aging coal plants that are bleeding money and polluting communities to stay online.”
The Energy Department's “unlawful actions attempted to make families and businesses in the Midwest wastefully pay hundreds of millions of dollars for a coal plant that should have been shut down over a year ago,” Kelly said Friday. The Campbell plant and other aging sites are “incredibly expensive, dangerous to our health and break down frequently,” he said.
Sanjay Narayan, a lawyer for the Sierra Club, called the ruling a victory for families across the Midwest who are “paying to keep this old, expensive and dirty power plant online.”
The Trump administration “has been pulling out all the stops to try to bolster dirty and expensive fossil fuels at public expense. This reckless agenda will not succeed,” Narayan said. "We will continue to fight back against the other illegal extensions across the country.”
Associated Press writer Ed White in Detroit contributed to this story.
FILE - An aerial image of Consumer Energy's J.H. Campbell Generating Complex is seen in Ottawa County, Mich., Sept. 21, 2024. (Joel Bissell/Kalamazoo Gazette via AP, File)
U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright speaks after the signing of an oil agreement between the US and Venezuela at Miraflores presidential palace in Caracas, Venezuela, Wednesday, Sept. 2, 2026. (AP Photo/Pedro Mattey)
