When Michel Platini arrived at the Nanterre offices of the prosecutor of France's financial crime unit last Tuesday morning, he would have been prepared for a robust interrogation.
However, he perhaps was not expecting the full 15 hours of questioning to which the French anti-corruption police subjected him. He was finally released just after 1am.
The former France and Juventus No 10 has become used to such indignities since being forced to stand down as UEFA president in 2016 after receiving an unexplained £1.4million bonus payment from disgraced FIFA president Sepp Blatter.
French policeman Jean-Yves Lourgouilloux is trying to eradicate corruption from sport
Michel Platini's arrest was just the latest stage of a massive investigation by France’s financial crime unit into sports corruption
France's National Finance Office (the PNF) are believed to be particularly interested in a lunch organised on November 23, 2010 – 10 days before the awarding of the 2022 World Cup.
The lunch involved Platini, then-French president Nicolas Sarkozy, the current Emir of Qatar Tamim Bin Hamad Al Thani and Sheikh Hamad Bin Jassem, then-Prime Minister and foreign minister of Qatar.
Platini has claimed of that lunch: 'I knew I was going to vote for Qatar before lunch and I went to see Nicolas Sarkozy to tell him. I did not know that the Qataris would be there.'
He has admitted he first planned to vote for the United States as World Cup hosts before being convinced by Qatar's bid.
Le Monde claim the PNF also want to speak to former FIFA president Sepp Blatter, despite having already questioned him as a witness in April 2017.
In December 2017, when Platini was first questioned by France's specialist prosecutor for financial crimes, he had his homes at Nyon and in the Parisian suburb of Saint-Cloud extensively searched.
Platini has not been charged. He is still a witness helping the police. His lawyer insisted that his client has nothing to hide and no part in a wider sports corruption investigation the French police are undertaking. Platini was given the status 'garde a vue', a French legal term which enables police to question you for 24 hours before release.
It sounds like Platini was treated with civility and he can count himself lucky if the accounts of past suspects of the same inquiry are anything to go by. Some sports officials in this investigation have been subjected to dawn raids by police. One fainted when cops turned up to frogmarch him out of his house, in front of his family, and into a jail cell.
Officials were locked in solitary cells and left to stew while police interviewed their colleagues, then summoned them for their own interrogation. After an intensive spell of questioning, suspects were sent back to their solitary cell, presumably to ponder what colleagues might be saying about them.
In this instance, there was no question of Platini being held in a cell. He reported to the offices early morning by appointment. But police wanted to avoid any contact between him and fellow interviewees, officials connected to the former French president Nicolas Sarkozy, so they could compare accounts of the now infamous lunch between Platini, Sarkozy and the Emir of Qatar, Sheik Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani at the Elysee Palace on November 23, 2010.
The lunch took place nine days before Platini, as a FIFA executive committee member, would vote for the 2022 World Cup to take place in Qatar. Platini insists the lunch played no part, that he had no idea Sheik Tamim, who was then the Crown Prince of Qatar, would be there and that he had rung then FIFA chief Blatter immediately afterwards to inform him.
Platini was questioned extensively on the lunch and the subsequent sale a year later of Paris Saint-Germain to Qatar Sports Investment, the sporting arm of Qatar's sovereign wealth fund.
In short, the French investigation, initiated by Parquet National Financier, which is roughly analogous to the Crown Prosecution Service combined with the Serious Fraud Office, is a heavy duty operation. In charge is the debonair Bordeaux-educated Jean-Yves Lourgouilloux, an old-school police investigator who seems to have a healthy disdain for social hierarchies and the status of once-feted sports grandees.
His investigation has meant that Lamine Diack, former president of the International Association of Athletics Federations, has been under house arrest in Paris since 2015, as part of a continuing probe into a network of corruption across sport.
Diack was forced to step down as president in 2015 when the seriousness of this investigation became clear, with doping tests covered up and cash paid to companies associated with his son, Papa.
Platini pictured during the 2018 and 2022 World Cup announcement held in Zurich, in 2010
It is not just the award of the World Cup to Qatar by FIFA which is in their sights. French police suspect several major sporting events of the past decade have been awarded due to large scale corruption within FIFA, the IAAF and the International Olympic Committee.
Since the award of events under suspicion, FIFA, the IOC and IAAF have all reformed their
