FIFA's ongoing scandal continues to trickle up its executive hierarchy. According to news reports, the organization's secretary general, Jerome Valcke, has been accused of being involved in a scam that sold World Cup tickets at four times their face value.
In total, the scam brought in millions of dollars for Valcke alone. Roughly 8,300 tickets "disappeared" from a Brazilian marketing firm that had been tasked with selling them ahead of the 2014 World Cup.
The scam was made public by a Brazilian businessman named Benny Alon, who worked closely with Valcke and FIFA -- and who corresponded with Valcke before word of the scandal reached the public.
According to the Brazilian newspaper Estadão, Valcke pulled a bait-and-switch on Alon.
When Alon discovered the tickets were missing, he confronted Valcke in Zurich. Valcke said he would replace the tickets with even better ones.
Instead, Alon says he was given much worse tickets than the ones Valcke had swiped. In the process, a lot of numbers were tossed around, creating confusion about who was receiving how many tickets, of what kind, and when.
FIFA has placed Valcke on leave after the revelation of the scandal. Valcke is a significant figure to be implicated not only because of his prominent position in the organization, but also because he is widely seen as Sepp Blatter's right-hand man.
And while Valcke is facing this sort of career danger for the first time, he's been tied to scandals before and somehow managed to escape consequence.
He was allegedly involved in a $10 million transfer that was used as bribe money when FIFA was securing the 2010 World Cup for South Africa.
So there's been quite a bit of smoke around Valcke. Now he's finally feeling the fire.