The European Court of Human Rights has rejected an appeal by former Chelsea forward Adrian Mutu that could see the retired Romanian repay millions to the English Premier League club.
In September 2004, Mutu failed a drugs test for cocaine and was released by Chelsea a month later for breach of contract. He also received a seven-month ban and a £20,000 fine from the English Football Association.
Mutu was ordered by the Court of Arbitration for Sport (Cas) to pay Chelsea €17.1 million (Dh72m) in damages, upholding an earlier ruling by football’s world ruling body Fifa made in 2006.
The 39-year-old Romanian, who now works on the coaching staff at Arabian Gulf League club Al Wahda, questioned the impartiality of the Cas ruling when it was made in 2009. A subsequent appeal, with the Swiss Federal Supreme Court, in September 2009 was dismissed a year later.
A final appeal, to the ECHR, fell on deaf ears.
The ECHR also rejected an appeal by German speed skating legend Claudia Pechstein, who like Mutu also appealed against a two-year doping ban on claims that initial rulings made by the Cas had lacked "independence and impartiality".
In a statement issued on Tuesday focusing on both athletes, the Strasbourg-based court said: "The Court found that the Cas arbitration proceedings to which the applicants had been parties were required to offer all the safeguards of a fair hearing, and that the second applicant's [Pechstein] allegations concerning a structural absence of independence and impartiality in the CAS, like the first applicant's [Mutu] criticisms concerning the impartiality of certain arbitrators, had to be rejected."
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