The president of South America’s soccer federation faces an ethics complaint alleging he took millions of dollars from funds the body recovered after the 2015 global soccer corruption scandal, The New York Times reported.

Alejandro Dominguez, the head of Conmebol and one of FIFA’s eight vice presidents, is accused of receiving more than $5 million from money the South American federation clawed back after its previous leaders were caught up in the U.S. Justice Department’s sweeping FIFA case a decade ago, the Times reported. The complaint was lodged by a whistleblower who claims direct knowledge of the payments.

Senior FIFA officials have been aware of the complaint to the body’s ethics committee for more than a year, the newspaper said, citing three people with direct knowledge who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter.

Dominguez took over Conmebol, the governing body for 10 South American FIFA member nations, in 2016 after his predecessor was indicted and jailed in the 2015 U.S. investigation. That probe uncovered more than $150 million in bribes and kickbacks spanning two decades involving soccer officials at Conmebol and Concacaf, the North and Central American confederation, and sports marketing executives, according to the report. 

Investigators said officials rigged World Cup bids and awarded broadcast and marketing contracts in exchange for bribes paid through convoluted financial deals, sometimes in briefcases of cash.

According to the complaint, the recovered money relates to funds retrieved from bank accounts that were once controlled by Conmebol officials implicated in the 2015 scandal, the newspaper said. The complaint alleges some of the money was kept by Dominguez as “a form of secret bonus or commission,” and by at least one other Conmebol official.

Documents reviewed by the Times show agreements between Conmebol and the family of former president Nicolás Leoz that returned more than $50 million from accounts in Paraguay and Switzerland. The payments were structured as a complete settlement and did not include any admission of guilt, the documents showed. Leoz, who had been indicted by U.S. authorities, died in 2019 amid a legal effort to avoid extradition. Conmebol confirmed in 2020 that it had secured the money.

In 2020, after announcing the recovery, Dominguez said, “I made a promise to do justice beyond the judicial sphere, to renew the institution, to generate value beyond what was previously known, and to reinvest that value, to give back to football what belongs to football,” the Times reported.

The status of the complaint against Dominguez is not known, and the NYT said FIFA’s ethics process has grown more opaque since Gianni Infantino became president in 2016. Before that, FIFA’s nominally independent ethics committee would confirm details of investigations involving prominent individuals, the report said. Last year, María Claudia Rojas, the Colombian head of the committee’s adjudicatory chamber, told reporters that cases can take several years to conclude.

“There’s no transparency whatsoever in how the ethics committee handles complaints, and often no final resolution,” Miguel Maduro, the first head of governance appointed by Infantino, told the newspaper. “Instead of dismissing the complaint or acting on it, they simply many times keep it there and no one knows what they will do.”