by Heidi Blake
The Ugly Game
First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2015
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Copyright © 2015 by Times Newspapers Limited
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ISBN: 978-1-47114-934-4
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This book is dedicated to the casualties of corrupt decisions everywhere and the whistleblowers who risk so much to expose the rot in the hope of a better world.
Contents
Prologue
1. A Surprising Proposal
2. Brother Jack, Der Kaiser and a Man with a Parrot
3. Bagmen and Brown Envelopes: The Campaign Begins
4. A Corrupt Official Called Seedy
5. How to Score Points
6. Cocktails, Conspiracy and a Million-dollar Dinner
7. A Crimefighter in Cowboy Boots Comes to Zurich
8. My Enemy’s Enemy
9. Who Is Sim Hong Chye?
10. The Casino King, the Thai Voter and the Gas Deal
11. Spies, Siberia and the Psychic Octopus
12. Sex, Lies and Videotape
13. Only God Knows What You Do for the Brothers
14. In Every Crisis, an Opportunity
15. Who Watches?
16. A Fine Lesson in Machiavellian Expertise
17. No Pause on the Path of Treason
18. The Riches of Ruin
19. The Deal
20. I Have Seen the Ugly Face of Football
21. After the Story, the Civil War
Epilogue
The Ugly Game Cast List
Acknowledgements
List of Illustrations
Prologue
The announcement that the tiny desert state of Qatar had been chosen to host the football World Cup in 2022 was greeted with shock and disbelief in the packed auditorium in Zurich and around the world. The great and the good of international football exchanged incredulous glances in stunned silence as the Qatari royal family erupted into jubilant cheers, clenching their fists in the air.
It was a snowy afternoon on 2 December 2010 in the Swiss city where FIFA, world football’s governing body, has its headquarters. This was the climax of years of frenzied campaigning by the nine countries competing to host the world’s biggest sporting tournament – worth billions of dollars and priceless prestige to the victor.
How had a minuscule Gulf state, with virtually no football tradition or infrastructure and searing summer temperatures of up to 50°C, beaten established footballing countries with much stronger bids? One man, more than any other in that room, knew the answer. Mohamed bin Hammam, the billionaire Qatari FIFA official, waited modestly for the royal celebrations to subside before stepping forward to embrace the Emir and kiss the young sheikh at the head of his country’s bid on the cheek. No casual observer would have guessed that this dapper man, with his mild manner and his neat silver beard, was the true architect of Qatar’s astonishing and improbable victory. Even the men who ran the official bid committee would tell you he had nothing to do with their campaign.
Since that day in Zurich, allegations of corruption have swirled around Qatar’s World Cup bid. Journalists, private investigators and powerful figures in football have tried to unravel the mystery of how the royals commanding the country’s campaign from their desert palaces could have pulled off such an audacious feat. But the hidden hand of Bin Hammam remained a closely guarded secret – until a massive leak of confidential data changed everything.
In the early months of 2014, more than three years after Qatar’s triumph, journalists working at The Sunday Times Insight team in London received a phone call. The familiar voice of a well-connected source at the top of world football told them a whistleblower from inside FIFA had come forward with what appeared to be a large and explosive cache of documents. The source arranged an introduction and then took a step back. Coming face to face with the Insight team, Jonathan Calvert and Heidi Blake, for the first time in a London hotel, the whistleblower explained nervously how he had developed grave concerns about the way Qatar had won the World Cup and had decided its secrets needed to be spilled.
He led the journalists to a discreet location far away from London where they were shown a treasure-trove of hundreds of millions of documents stored on a network of supercomputers. Many of the files related to the activities of Bin Hammam working secretly to bring the World Cup to Qatar against the odds. The whistleblower himself had barely scraped the surface of the vast mass of information, but he wanted the journalists to dive in. Over the course of the next three months, the reporters worked day and night in a secret data centre with the blinds drawn, surrounded by the whirring of overheating servers and the blinking lights of powerful machinery, all hidden behind the bland façade of a high-street shop front.
The scale of the leak was unprecedented. The whistleblower had given the reporters the key to emails, faxes, telephone logs, electronic messages, letters, bank slips, accounts, cash chits, handwritten notes, flight records, secret reports, diaries, minutes of confidential meetings, computer hard drives and more. The documents were a portal into the secret command centre from which Bin Hammam waged his campaign to buy World Cup support and later the dare-devil attempt to topple the FIFA president Sepp Blatter which led to his own spectacular downfall. The reporters used forensic search technology to unravel the network of slush funds from which he paid millions of dollars in bribes to scores of FIFA officials and to piece together the backroom deals and vote-rigging ploys which brought him first victory and then disgrace. The man who overcame the odds to bring glory to his country now lives anonymously in his mansion in Doha, the capital of Qatar, estranged from the royal family he once served and sworn to silence as preparations for the World Cup he brought home to his city gather pace around him.
The Ugly Game comes in the wake of ‘The FIFA Files’ exposé in The Sunday Times – a world exclusive that made headlines around the planet when it broke on the eve of the Brazil World Cup in June 2014. It tells the extraordinary story of the most corrupt World Cup bidding contest in history, shining a light into the darkest recesses of FIFA through the portal of Bin Hammam’s secret campaign. It is a human drama of personal triumph and disaster, of one man who realised an impossible dream but was brought low by overreaching ambition. It is a tale awash with dirty money but glittering with mystery and intrigue – its characters swept up in the treacherous currents of sport’s power politics. Above all it is an invitation to join Bin Hammam as he m
oves through the corridors of world football greasing palms and striking deals; revealing the ugly venality of the men who control the beautiful game.
One
A Surprising Proposal
The air was thick with tobacco smoke and tension. A small clutch of men in long white dishdashas were craning around their host Mohamed bin Hammam in the dimly lit room. Cardamom-scented steam rose from cups of Arabic coffee freshly poured from a fine golden dallah by robed servants who melted in and out of the shadows. No one was watching the football match flickering on the wall. The Qatari billionaire had a lot to get off his chest, and his guests were listening intently. Tonight, like every other night, Bin Hammam was holding court in his majlis, the male-only sitting room of his Doha mansion where local men came to lounge in exquisite comfort as they smoked and drank coffee or mint tea.
These evenings had once been relaxed and jovial affairs, alive with the hubbub of many voices and shouts of celebration or dismay as goals were scored or saved on the giant television screens. Bin Hammam was known by his friends around the world for being generous to a fault, and he was never without company. At the peak of his success, he had opened his home every night to dozens of men who piled into the sitting room at sunset to talk and watch football before moving through to the dining room to feast on Qatari specialities at his banqueting table. His guests gorged themselves on flatbreads stuffed with marinated shawarma meat, vine leaves, spicy kabsa, zatar pie, tabbouleh salads, baba ghanoush and ghuzi lamb, all washed down with ice-cold mineral water.
Back then Bin Hammam was away on football business as often as he was at home, but when he was present at the head of the table, his grandchildren skipped around him and he would break off from the dining-room chatter to tousle their hair or press sweets into their palms. Neither his younger wife Nahed, a beautiful Jordanian who dressed demurely in western clothes and spoke French, nor the older Fatima, who covered her face and had been at Bin Hammam’s side for many years, were anywhere to be seen when the men were at the table. In his glory days, these gatherings had been lively, crowded occasions, with guests jostling for position for a word with their host. Now all was lost, Nahed had left him and just a few loyal friends remained in the majlis.
This quiet evening, only Bin Hammam’s voice could be heard by the newcomer who had been ushered past the football pictures lining the hallway into the splendour of the sitting room, and was now approaching the party through the haze of cigarette smoke in the air. Having slipped off his shoes at the door, the tanned visitor in a crisp open-collared shirt and a dark blue business suit padded across the carpet. He was an unfamiliar face in the room, and the locals eyed this western interloper with caution, but he was greeted warmly by their host. He smiled respectfully as he settled into an ochre sofa opposite Bin Hammam, but something had unnerved him.
It was a few months since the visitor had said goodbye to the Qatari in Zurich, and his friend had changed. It wasn’t that he was any less immaculate than usual. His silver beard was tightly trimmed around his strong jaw and the spotless white keffiyeh his servants had pressed that morning flowed over athletic shoulders. But for all Bin Hammam’s finery and the opulence of his surroundings, it was clear that his spirits were tattered. The 62-year-old was admired by all who knew him for his steady poise and dignity. Now his shoulders were hunched and his eyes were circled with dark shadows. His friend was worried. Did Mohamed’s hand tremble as he reached for his golden coffee cup, or did he dream it? Did his voice quaver as he spoke? How could he be so altered? This man had forged a long career as a captain of industry at the helm of a multi-billion-dollar construction firm, riding the economic boom that thrust the shimmering metropolis of Doha skywards out of the desert. He had transcended his humble origins and surged through the ranks of Qatari society, becoming one of the richest men in a city of billionaires with a place in the inner sanctum of the Emir’s most trusted counsellors. Now he was brought low, and by what? A game.
Bin Hammam’s friends, like his family, knew that football had always been his first love. Now it had spurned him. The man who had pulled off the audacious feat of winning the right to host the World Cup in the Qatari desert only months before was now in disgrace and banned for life from the game he adored. Shut out and consigned to silence, there was nothing left for Bin Hammam but to watch as Qatar’s plans to host the tournament he had brought home for his country took shape outside. In the weeks and months after his spectacular downfall in May 2011, he sat among the friends who gathered in his mansion each night, going round and round the events leading up to the catastrophe, trying to make sense of how it could have happened.
The billionaire spoke slowly and deliberately, but there was one word that almost choked him with its bitterness every time it spilled from his lips: Blatter. The traitor he had once called his brother. The man who owed him everything, for whom he had been prepared to sacrifice even the last precious moments with a dying son. The man whose presidential crown by rights belonged to him. The man who had destroyed him.
Bin Hammam had been a hero in world football before his career was wiped out in one sickening blast by the bribery scandal that had exploded under the Caribbean sun in the Port of Spain, blotting out all he had achieved. Everyone knew the lurid details of what had happened on that ill-fated junket for a host of small-time local football chieftains whose loyalty he had tried and failed to secure. The world had seen the photographs of cash spilling out of manilla envelopes which had surfaced like bloated corpses, bobbing in the warm West Indian waters, when those traitors had turned on him in the days after the trip.
But there was much about Bin Hammam’s demise which continued to mystify even the most knowing onlookers. This was the man who had achieved the impossible by bringing the World Cup to the desert, and his downfall had followed strangely quickly on the heels of that improbable triumph. His visitor was puzzled. Why had Bin Hammam’s old friends at FIFA turned so viciously against him? And why were the young figureheads of Qatar’s 2022 World Cup Supreme Committee so quick to disown their former mentor? Strangest of all, why had this proud man suddenly crawled away so quietly?
The Qatari football grandee denied the specific allegations against him and he was known to be planning an appeal in the relative secrecy of the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), but on all other matters he was sworn to silence. So the men who gathered in the privacy of his majlis were the only people who would be trusted to hear the whole story. It was these men who sat listening intently that night as Bin Hammam mulled over his ruination. Mostly they were locals, sweeping into the mansion set back from the hot city street as the sun went down outside. Every now and again, they were joined by a friend from Bin Hammam’s days in Zurich, like the visitor who had entered this evening: westerners who flew through Doha from time to time and stopped to see a man they remembered at the peak of his powers. So Bin Hammam told these guests his story. How it all began. How he had turned his boyhood dreams into reality. How it had ended like this.
All his life, Mohamed bin Hammam had been gripped by a peculiar passion for football. The obsession had kept him up at night as a youth, straining to hear the commentary on his favourite team, Liverpool, crackling out of his father’s transistor radio from a country far away. Football was a lonely love for a boy from Doha in the 1950s, and Mohamed cut a solitary figure kicking his ball around the dusty streets and scrublands. Many of his friends didn’t even know how to play this strange foreign game.
Bin Hammam was born in Doha in 1949 – the same year Qatar shipped off its very first exports of crude oil – when the country was just an obscure Gulf statelet under British protection. This tiny peninsula, which juts out of the Arabian mainland into the Persian Gulf, had a minuscule population of just 25,000 back then. The energy boom was on the distant horizon as the oil started gushing out of Qatar’s wells, but the city had not yet started shooting up out of the desert into the gleaming mirage of glass it was destined to become. Back then, the sandy dirt roads w
here Mohamed played were lined with crumbling single-storey buildings, the sky pierced only by the minarets of the Wahhabi mosques where he and his father went to worship.
This little boy chasing his tattered ball through the dusty streets wasn’t only marked out from his peers by his strange love of a foreign sport. Mohamed’s wide-set features and tight cap of black curls belied the distant African ancestry that would always set him apart from the pure-bred Arabs who ruled the roost in Doha. His mother was a nurse and his father a local businessman, both of whom had been born Qatari, but way back in the family’s lineage was an ancestor from Africa In this tiny country differences like that stuck out, and being different meant never quite belonging.
Mohamed dribbled his ball along the rocky paths leading up the West Bay and ran along the waterfront, ducking between the pearl merchants’ rowing boats dotting the unpaved foreshore. He scampered up the jetty, with the cobalt waters of the Persian Gulf glittering all around him, watching the fishermen bobbing on the waves and the lighters chugging out to meet the cargo ships on the horizon. The skyline was speckled with the white masts of dhows carrying fruit, vegetables and barrels of fresh water along the Eastern Arabian shores, and from time to time an oil tanker loomed into view – a harbinger of the vast mineral riches his tiny country was beginning to discover. And with oil, came football. Down by the West Bay, little Mohamed would watch with wide eyes as, all along the shore, foreign oil workers fresh off the boat from Europe played his beloved game. He saw how they threw down their grubby flannel shirts to mark the goalposts, divided into teams and tossed a coin for the first kick. He heard them shouting to one another in strange foreign tongues; clapping each other on the back; cheering in celebration when the ball flew through the makeshift goalposts in clouds of desert dust.
Football arrived in Doha with the foreigners who flocked to the Gulf when Qatar first began spudding its vast oil reserves at the end of the Second World War. The country had come under British protection after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and its first onshore oil concession was awarded in 1935 to the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company – the predecessor of BP – and operated by a local firm that would become the Qatar Petroleum Company. Drilling began in the late 1930s, but the war delayed its full development and the first crude exports didn’t start until 1949, the year Bin Hammam was born, by which time 5,000 barrels a day were gushing out of that first well.