by Heidi Blake
It was wearying work, sitting for the most part in silence with their backs turned to each other, their eyes glued to screens in opposite corners of the room, scouring their secret haul for the single explosive element which would blow the whole story wide open. There were hundreds of millions of documents from inside Bin Hammam’s private office in Doha, the headquarters of the Asian Football Confederation in Kuala Lumpur, the offices of the official Qatar World Cup bid and FIFA itself.
It was a physical impossibility to read them all, so the pair had hired a technical expert to set them up with forensic technology which allowed them to run smart searches across the vast database. They could now narrow down the millions of documents by searching multiple combinations of key names and phrases, filtering the results by variables like date-range, author or the location where the document was created. When they found relevant material, they could apply tags to cluster it together so they could navigate back to it quickly. The cache contained emails, faxes, accounts, bank records, telephone logs, letters, electronic messages, minutes of meetings, confidential reports, flight manifests, travel bookings and more. It was a data leak on an astonishing scale. For FIFA and the Qatar World Cup bid, this was nothing short of a catastrophe.
So far, the reporters had read thousands of documents, many of which set their journalistic antennae wagging. Qatar had always claimed Bin Hammam had played no part in its successful World Cup campaign, but there was plenty of evidence here that his role had really been crucial, as the source suspected. There was proof of secret meetings between Bin Hammam and members of the FIFA executive committee at which the voters were showered with lavish hospitality as the World Cup bid was discussed. There were emails from shadowy fixers hinting at dubious back-room deals, and flight records showing Bin Hammam had flown voters across the world on his private jet to meet the Emir. But still the reporters had not yet found the smoking gun they were looking for: the document that proved corruption beyond doubt. Until now.
Calvert was frowning and leaning closer to his screen.
‘Huh,’ he said. Blake spun round.
‘What have you found?’ The pair had worked together closely for several years, and they knew each other inside out. Calvert had a cool head and there wasn’t much he hadn’t seen before. Blake was more readily excited by the first glimpse of a breakthrough. She had learned to read her colleague’s reactions, and when Calvert said ‘Huh,’ she knew he had struck upon something worth hearing about. She scooted across the room on her swivel chair. Calvert was staring at a grainy facsimile of a blue bank transfer slip, dated 18 June 2009. The slip showed that $10,000 had been paid into the personal account of a Mr Seedy MB Kinteh at Standard Chartered Bank, Serrekunda Branch, Gambia. The money had come from the account of an Aisha Mohd Al Abdullah at Doha Bank, Al Handasa Branch.
‘Aisha is Bin Hammam’s daughter,’ said Blake. ‘She’s come up in the documents before. But who’s that she’s paying?’
‘Seedy Kinteh is the president of the Gambian FA,’ said Calvert. ‘Or at least he was. I’ve just Googled him. He was banned from football last year over financial irregularities in the federation.’ They looked at each other. Blake was grinning.
‘A corrupt official called Seedy! This is basically the high point of my career so far,’ she laughed. ‘But seriously, what is Bin Hammam’s daughter doing paying this guy ten grand the year before the World Cup vote? What possible innocent explanation is there?’
‘God knows,’ murmured Calvert. ‘But I wonder if there are more of these.’
The transfer slip was attached to an email that had been sent to Bin Hammam’s closest aide, Najeeb Chirakal, by accounts staff at his construction company, Kemco, after the money was paid to Kinteh. The reporters quickly discovered that Aisha’s account was administered by staff at Kemco to make dozens of payments like this one. In fact, it was one of ten slush funds, including Bin Hammam’s own account, which the Kemco clerks used to funnel cash to football officials at Chirakal’s instruction.
The reporters found that if they ran searches for the standard Kemco email address, they hit a rich seam of emails just like this, with the grainy blue bank transfer slips attached. Over the next few days, they gathered evidence of scores of payments that Bin Hammam’s staff at Kemco had made to the heads of football associations across Africa and Asia in the two years before and straight after the World Cup vote. They began compiling spreadsheets of the transactions, noting down the amounts, dates and account details and the content of the emails accompanying the transfer slips. They added each of the payments to a timeline they were building of Bin Hammam’s activities, which began to reveal a clear picture of the Qatari’s campaign to build up a groundswell of support among football officials across the continents of Africa and Asia.
It was evident that the bulk of the African payments coalesced around a series of junkets which were hosted by Bin Hammam in Kuala Lumpur and later Doha. Days after they discovered the first Kemco payment slip, Blake uncovered AFC accounts documents which revealed how his bagman Mohammed Meshadi had withdrawn hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash to provide handouts to the visitors in Kuala Lumpur in June and October 2008. By the end of the week there was no doubting Bin Hammam’s corrupt activity. In the two years leading up to the World Cup vote, he had paid more than $5 million to the leaders of 30 football federations across Africa in cash handouts and transfers of as much as $200,000 from the slush funds operated by his staff at Kemco.
But the reporters were far from finished. Next, they wanted to know whether the officials appointed to head Qatar’s World Cup bid committee could be connected to the junkets at which Bin Hammam bought the support of his African brothers.
Five
How to Score Points
FIFA’s hilltop headquarters was suffused with milky morning light as the cavalcade of limousines glided down the landscaped drive on the morning of 16 March 2009. The young son of Qatar’s Emir gazed out of the window, taking in the futuristic glass and granite edifice of the home of world football rising up ahead. Resting in his lap was the sheaf of documents required to register his country’s official bid to host the 2022 World Cup, which he had been sent to hand over to the FIFA president, Sepp Blatter.
This was a big moment for Sheikh Mohammed bin Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani. Aged just 20, he had been put at the head of the team officially charged with bringing the world’s biggest sporting tournament to his home country. Sheikh Mohammed was still an undergraduate, studying international relations at the Georgetown University campus which opened in Doha as part of his father’s diplomatic entente with the USA. The Emir had big plans for him once he graduated. When he finished his studies in two months’ time, he would be made the assistant director of the Prime Minister’s office for International Affairs, and he would spearhead Qatar’s World Cup campaign on the global stage as the chairman of its official bid committee. His father was counting on him. All of Qatar was counting on him. It was a heavy responsibility to carry on such young shoulders.
Sheikh Mohammed was the Emir’s fifth child with his second wife, the dusky beauty Sheikha Mozah bint Nasser Al Missned, and he was his mother’s son. All the young royal had inherited from his hulking father in the looks department was the little gap between his front teeth in an otherwise Daz-white filmstar smile. Like Sheikha Mozah, he was tall with finely carved features, and a glossy black sweep of perfectly coiffed hair. Sheikh Mohammed looked every bit the dashing young royal when out on duties in Doha with his silk robes shining as spotlessly white as the Diwan Palace. But he was more at ease when abroad, as he was today, wearing the suits he had hand-woven from rare and exquisite fibres by the finest tailors in the world.
Sheikh Mohammed wasn’t just a pretty face: he had sporting pedigree, too. As the captain of Qatar’s equestrian team, he had captured hearts across Asia three years before when he emerged on horseback from underground at the opening ceremony of the 15th Asian Games in Doha and galloped to the top of the sta
dium to light the ceremonial flame. He played for the Georgetown University football side and he supported the Al Sadd team in the Qatar Stars League. There was no doubt that he was a glamorous figurehead for Qatar’s international sporting ambitions. But how much did this young sheikh really know about football politics?
The cavalcade passed through the security gates and descended into the bowels of the building where FIFA’s well-paid executives parked their Porsches and Ferraris. The chauffeurs leapt out to open the doors and Sheikh Mohammed emerged. Climbing out behind him was the wiry figure of his new companion. Hassan Al-Thawadi was the freshly anointed chief executive of Qatar’s 2022 bid committee. Al-Thawadi was rake-thin and a touch bug-eyed with a jaw that jutted so sharply it sometimes gave him a mean look when he forgot to arrange his face. But he was as smart as a whip, and he wasn’t there for appearance’s sake. It was Sheikh Mohammed’s job to lend the grace of his royal presence to Qatar’s World Cup dream; Al-Thawadi would bring the brains.
The bid’s new chief executive was only 30, but he was already the legal director at the Qatar Investment Authority, the country’s vast sovereign wealth fund which was pushing its financial might around the world through its ballooning property and business portfolio. Al-Thawadi was the son of a former Qatari ambassador to Spain and he had spent much of his youth in Europe. It wasn’t all glamour: he took his A levels in the struggling British steel town of Scunthorpe, and went on to study law at Sheffield University. Al-Thawadi came home the proud possessor of a law degree with the gloss of a Western education, but his sojourn in the industrial north of England had thrown a touch of grit into the mix. For all that he was charismatic and articulate, there was something a little scratchy about this fiery young lawyer.
Al-Thawadi’s early business career had taken him to live in Houston, Texas, which accounted for his mid-Atlantic accent and his appealing command of slangy American English. But his father had been a friend of the Emir’s, and it did not take long for the ambitious young lawyer to be airlifted into positions of power in Qatar. He had worked as a senior lawyer at Qatar Petroleum, the state oil company, and he had taken the job of general counsel to its sovereign wealth fund just a year before. Now he had the chance to be part of making history.
Al-Thawadi had returned from Britain with a case of football fever that he couldn’t shake. He still regularly checked the scores of Scunthorpe and Sheffield United, but the teams he loved best of all were Liverpool and Real Madrid. The European leagues held an impossible glamour for him. He had played with distinction as an attacking left-back in Qatar Club’s youth team, modelling himself on the great Italian defender Paolo Maldini, and now he was the legal director of Al Sadd club – Sheikh Mohammed’s favourite side. But it was all such small beer compared with the gladiatorial clashes between international superstars he had grown up watching in the European leagues. The chance to bring the greatest sporting show on earth to his home country flushed him with tingling excitement. Al-Thawadi would use all his fiery passion and intellect to make the dream come true.
The young chairman and chief executive of the bid were accompanied by an older man with baggy eyes and straggling grey hair long enough to brush his shoulders. He was Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa bin Ahmed Al Thani, the president of the Qatar Football Association and himself a member of the royal family. This elder statesman of Qatari football with his bristling steel-wool beard was there to lend some gravitas to the youthful delegation. But none of the three Qataris who were now striding through the granite corridors towards Blatter’s office to submit their country’s World Cup bid had an iota of the international football experience of the one man who was missing from the party.
Mohamed bin Hammam was conspicuous by his absence. The country’s most senior football official was a natural choice to join the delegation: he had been there at the inception of the Emir’s World Cup dream as Blatter well knew. But his role in pushing Qatar’s bid needed to remain under wraps. In submitting their registration documents that day, Qatar signed up to rules of conduct which banned its official bid committee or any of its associates from providing any football official with ‘monetary gifts [or] any kind of personal advantage that could give even the impression of exerting influence, or conflict of interest, either directly or indirectly, in connection with the bidding process’. That was exactly what Bin Hammam was doing behind the scenes in Africa on a mass scale – whether or not the new leaders of Qatar’s bid knew it. But so long as he was not publicly associated with the official committee, he acted with impunity.
Bin Hammam may not have been present when the bid was formally registered that day, but he was not far away. He was, in fact, also in Zurich, ready to attend a meeting of the executive committee the next day. Najeeb Chirakal, his closest aide, arranged for his chauffeur to pop down to FIFA headquarters shortly after the delegation departed to pick up $25,000 in cash from Bin Hammam’s FIFA account. It was just a bit of spending money while the Qatari billionaire was in town, on top of the $16,342 in expenses and daily allowances that he claimed for his three-day visit.
Blatter was typically gracious as he accepted the sheaf of documents which formalised Qatar’s World Cup bid that March morning, and wished the young leaders well in their campaign. Beside him was his secretary general, Jérôme Valcke, a handsome, bulky Frenchman in his late forties with a crop of curly chestnut hair and cool blue eyes. Valcke was as much of a power-broker as Blatter had been when he was secretary general under João Havelange. He and the president were as closely conspiratorial as two men who so jealously guarded their own self-interest could ever be. Valcke was no ingénu. He knew that for all the formal presentations and glossy bid books and the scrutiny of FIFA’s technical assessment team, the real deciding factor in this bidding contest would be the same thing that had transformed world football’s governing body into the global powerhouse it was today. It would all come down to cold, hard cash. And as he eyed the Qatari dignitaries smiling graciously and glad-handing Blatter that morning, he was in no doubt that these were serious contenders.
That same day, ten other contenders entered the running for the 2018 and 2022 tournaments by submitting their bid registration documents to FIFA. The European nations were England, Russia and two joint bids which saw Spain teaming up with Portugal, and the Netherlands with Belgium. It was an open secret that the 2018 tournament would go to a bidder from their continent, but the Europeans initially hedged their bets by declaring their intention to compete for 2022 as well, though FIFA would eventually persuade them all to drop out of the running for the latter.
Indonesia and Mexico also entered the race at first, but soon fell out. The real contenders lined up against Qatar for the 2022 tournament were South Korea and Japan, who represented little threat because they had held the tournament together only six years earlier, and two more formidable opponents. First there was Australia, a sports-mad country which had demonstrated its flare for hosting a major tournament with the widely praised Sydney Olympics. Second, there was the United States which had hosted a World Cup once before in 1994. The US was viewed with suspicion by some in the FIFA Exco because it was not primarily a soccer-loving country, but its bid could not be underestimated. An American World Cup would have pizzazz. Its potential to bring in bumper television revenues, marketing opportunities and a sponsorship bonanza would light up the dollar signs in the eyes of the FIFA Exco.
Qatar’s official bid committee had to get serious if was going to beat off that kind of competition, and the young bid leaders knew it. After formally submitting his country’s registration documents at FIFA headquarters, Sheikh Mohammed released a statement. ‘We believe it is time to bring the World Cup to the Middle East for the very first time,’ he said. ‘Our bid truly epitomises FIFA’s slogan “For the Game, For the World” . . . It would allow the rest of the world to gain a true picture of Arab culture and hospitality.’ And the young royal acknowledged that he had a mountain to climb. ‘We know that we have a lot of work to do bef
ore the FIFA Executive Board makes its decision in December 2010,’ his statement concluded.
Sheikh Mohammed was right. While Bin Hammam manoeuvred behind the scenes, the new leaders of Qatar’s official bid team had their work cut out for them. It was their job to create a compelling case that Qatar was a viable place to host the World Cup, despite all the obvious impediments. They would have to come up with a plan to beat the sweltering heat with the most aggressive air-conditioning systems science could deliver, and devise a way of cramming the giant sporting jamboree into the cramped space available in one of the world’s tiniest countries.
They had to persuade FIFA’s team of technical evaluators that they were capable of building nine world-class stadiums and all the players’ and fans’ facilities from scratch in a country with only the scantest football infrastructure. There was no room in Doha: it would be necessary to build a whole new city out in the desert to fit it all in. Not only did they have to convince FIFA’s evaluation team, they had to find a plausible way to explain to fans around the globe why Qatar deserved to host their beloved tournament when it had no real football tradition to speak of, no serious professional league and not a single world-class player. The country languished near the bottom of FIFA’s world rankings – it would drop to 113th by the time of the vote – and had never come anywhere close to qualifying for the World Cup finals it wanted to host. Bin Hammam had made it his mission to sell the idea of a Qatar World Cup to the relatively small number of influential football officials required to sway the vote, and their loyalty often came with an affordable price tag. The bid committee had to dream up a way of selling it to the world. It was hard to say who had a more daunting task.