The Ugly Game: The Qatari Plot to Buy the World Cup

by Heidi Blake

  Far more interesting to Bin Hammam were the other two European bids. Behind the scenes, he had been working hard to build links with the Russia 2018 team, and he had lavished the official bid committee with his finest hospitality when they visited Doha in April. Russia and Qatar were the world’s two biggest gas exporting countries, and they had plenty of common interests to explore in order to cement an alliance. Platini and Beckenbauer were thought to be in the Russian camp, and the votes of those two football superstars would carry enormous weight. Bin Hammam was also mulling an approach to Spain’s voter, Ángel María Villar Llona. The Spaniard was known to have the three South American voters tied in to a vote pact to back the Iberian bid – as Lord Triesman had just blabbed so ill-advisedly to that honeytrap. If Bin Hammam could offer a bundle of votes to Spain–Portugal’s 2018 bid, and Villar Llona would agree in return to throw the four Latin voters behind Qatar 2022, then both countries would have a strong bloc of support in the opening round.

  Collusion deals weren’t the only way Qatar’s secret World Cup fixer was hoping to win votes in Europe. He was still working hard on winning Franz Beckenbauer’s vote in the later rounds once Australia had crashed out and, like the England bid, he knew that Platini could be key to securing the support of the UEFA contingent. Qatar was mulling some big investments in France that it would discuss later with the president, Nicolas Sarkozy, who was close to Platini. But in the meantime, it was as well for the country’s World Cup bid to do all it could to convince the French football legend of the merits of its campaign. So Bin Hammam cornered Platini in South Africa and asked if he would be willing to grant the official Qatar bid committee an audience at UEFA headquarters in Nyon later that year so they could give him a private presentation. The UEFA president was happy to oblige, and a meeting was arranged for that October. It was a big opportunity for Qatar’s young bid officials to make an impression on a giant of world football.

  Bin Hammam’s little party of three aides were having the time of their lives on their master’s coat-tails in South Africa. They piled into the stands to watch the best games – with Be sandwiched between Meshadi and Chirakal – and afterwards they dined out together and watched live late-night musical performances in the Michelangelo. Between matches and official duties in Johannesburg, the two men would be seen hovering outside the Michelangelo Tower smoking in Nelson Mandela Square – Chirakal in his comfortable chinos and baggy black jacket; Meshadi as smart as ever in a fitted black suit and lavender shirt. When Jenny Be came by she joked that they were ‘male models looking for jobs’, and Meshadi threw her a grin.

  The three flew between the tournament’s nine cities on Bin Hammam’s private jet, snapping aerial photographs out of the window. Be’s South Africa photo album was full of pictures of the group, between shots of the sun going down over the sea in Port Elizabeth, the morning haze around Cape Town’s Table Mountain and the Johannesburg skyline from her high hotel balcony in the Michelangelo Tower. In one picture, Meshadi and Chirakal slouched smiling with their arms around each other’s shoulders in the Soccer City stadium. In another, Meshadi hung fondly over the back of Be’s restaurant chair, grinning as she leaned in close with a mojito in front of her on the table. Be had written the caption: ‘When we are all still sober.’ The friends rarely had such fun.

  While the trio enjoyed themselves, Amadou Diallo was hard at work on Bin Hammam’s African brotherhood. It was the bagman’s job to fix the deals over drinks in the hotel, and then the baton would be passed to Chirakal to make the necessary transactions. During the stay, the secretary general of the Somalia FA, Abdiqani Said Arab, emailed Chirakal his bank details. Sure enough, $100,000 was paid to the federation from Bin Hammam’s daughter’s account. Another $50,000 was paid to the Niger FA from the same account and Aboubacar Bruno Bangoura of Guinea was sent €10,000 in Paris – both at Diallo’s request. Bin Hammam’s loyal champion, Fadoul Hussein of Djibouti, asked him to foot the bill for his wife and children to spend Ramadan in Doha, and Chirakal was duly instructed to book them a suite in the luxury Ezdan Hotel overlooking the Persian Gulf. This time all the charges were to be settled by the Qatar FA, rather than Bin Hammam. The month after the family returned from their holiday, Hussein would email his Qatari benefactor: ‘I think we have very good chance for to win the organisation WORLD CUP 2022 IN CHALLAH.’ Diallo had done sterling work in Africa again.

  Bin Hammam himself bought 60 tickets to key games costing around $5,000 and had them delivered to the hotel suite of the CAF president, Issa Hayatou, during the tournament.14 He was confident of Africa’s support for his country’s World Cup bid, but you could never be too certain, and why miss a chance to make a powerful man grateful? It was necessary to maintain his largesse to keep the pot boiling in Africa, but Bin Hammam’s real focus was elsewhere at this crucial stage in his campaign. He needed to lock down the three voters from Asia.

  The World Cup was reaching its close and the crowds were flocking back to Johannesburg ahead of the final between Spain and the Netherlands, to take place at Soccer City. FIFA’s pampered officials were enjoying the last round of galas and glitzy parties before the whole hoopla packed up for another four years and they drifted back to their home countries. Tonight, six days before the final, the soaring strains of the famous South Korean soprano Sumi Jo floated out on the night air as Mohamed bin Hammam stepped onto the lantern-lit veranda of the Johannesburg Country Club. The Qatari football grandee moved among the illustrious guests milling around on lawns which sloped gently towards the lake in the twilight of the warm July evening. His companion that night was every bit as refined: Bin Hammam was there as the special guest of a new and powerful ally, the South Korean FIFA voter Dr Chung Mong-joon.

  The two men had become all but inseparable during the 2010 World Cup in South Africa. They had travelled together between matches on Bin Hammam’s private jet, shared the astonishing luxury of FIFA’s VIP hospitality suites during key matches and dined together in the faux-Renaissance splendour of the Michelangelo. The entente with the South Korean voter was the cornerstone of Bin Hammam’s strategy to lock down the support Qatar needed in Asia.

  Chung was a haughty, handsome man with neat silvery side-parting and a proud countenance. He was no more overawed than Bin Hammam by the wealth flaunted around them at the Country Club that evening. As the majority shareholder in the car giant Hyundai, he was just as well acquainted as his new Qatari friend with the power of money. Bin Hammam’s chequebook would never have got him anywhere with a man as rich as Chung, but he had executed a more sophisticated plan to win the Hyundai scion’s loyalty. It had taken a masterful feat of diplomacy, largesse and political patronage to get to where they were tonight. No casual observer watching the two men chatting conspiratorially on the lawns would have guessed that these had been sworn enemies only a year before.

  Track back to spring 2009 and the two football bosses were locked in a bitter war of words which threatened to drive a wedge through the heart of Asian football. Chung was supporting a mutinous Bahraini plot to topple Bin Hammam from his position on the FIFA executive committee, and the Qatari was fighting tooth and nail to ward off the attack. Bin Hammam was being challenged for the West Asian seat that he had held unopposed for 14 years by Sheikh Salman bin Ebrahim al-Khalifa, the wealthy president of the Bahrain Football Association, and the contest would be decided at an election during the AFC’s congress in Kuala Lumpur that May. The elections for the seats allocated to Asia on FIFA’s executive committee took place separately from the ballot to elect the AFC’s own ruling officials, so Bin Hammam would not have to stand for re-election as president of his confederation until January 2011, even if he had lost his position at the FIFA. But limping on like that was unthinkable, and he had vowed publicly to stand aside as AFC president if he was deposed from the FIFA Exco. Bin Hammam was nothing if not a proud man, and that sort of failure would not be an option. He was determined to win at all costs.

  The Qatari had paid his old
friend Peter Hargitay to conduct covert surveillance on Chung, whom he suspected of bankrolling Sheikh Salman’s campaign. He was also using the services of Manilal Fernando, a corpulent Sri Lankan hustler and long-standing ally employed as FIFA’s South Asian development officer, to fix votes in his favour. By the end of March, Bin Hammam had received intelligence alleging that Chung’s associates were offering bribes of up to $200,000 to Asian national football associations to back Sheikh Salman, and he decided the time was right to strike. Live on Australian television, he accused the South Korean of attempting to buy votes to unseat him.

  The AFC president’s extraordinary broadside against a fellow executive committee member prompted an investigation by the usually sleepy FIFA ethics committee. It was met with outraged denials from Chung, and the South Koreans launched a counterattack by lodging their own ethics complaint about bizarre remarks Bin Hammam had made on television implying that he wanted to cut Chung’s head off.

  Hargitay swung into gear, whispering in the ear of tame reporters to ensure that his paymaster’s allegations got as much attention as possible and pouring scorn on the South Korean complaint. He boasted he had enlisted a patsy journalist he kept in his pocket to write a story which was sent out on the international newswires in mid-April, reporting that FIFA was investigating allegations that Bin Hammam’s rivals were paying bribes to try to unseat him. Hargitay sent the story to Bin Hammam, with the note: ‘Dear brother . . . Below please find a wire service story . . . it took me the better part of today to satisfy lawyers and other lunatics to let the story run . . . They had to add some Salman quotes for legal reasons (objectivity, etc) but have beautifully managed (with my insistence and input) to ridicule the Korean “complaint”.’ That was the sort of masterful media manipulation that made Hargitay’s services worth every bit of his hefty bill.

  But Blatter was furious. The FIFA family did not air its dirty linen in public. Its inner machinations were kept hidden from public view. That was how it survived. A furious row had now erupted between Chung and Bin Hammam, and it was damaging the image of world football. ‘Chung and myself have never enjoyed a good relationship . . . This man knows nothing about football,’ Bin Hammam briefed journalists acidly. He claimed Chung was paying to have him unseated to clear the path for his bid for the FIFA presidency. The South Korean went even further, accusing his Qatari nemesis of ‘acting like a head of a crime organisation’ as president of AFC and ‘suffering from mental problems’. ‘I am afraid that Mr Hammam may be a sick person who needs to be at a hospital rather than at FIFA,’ he told gobsmacked journalists.

  Blatter could take no more. The FIFA president issued an unusually sternly worded statement calling the warring candidates to play fair. ‘Football is a universal sport based on the fundamental principles of discipline and respect for opponents,’ it began, seraphically. ‘These values must be applied not only on the field of play, but also in the administration and governance of football, particularly in the area of sports politics. And of course, this includes elections to the governing bodies of football.’

  The two squabbling opponents were duly chastened and the public slanging match abated somewhat, but Bin Hammam had no intention of playing fair. Hargitay was hard at work digging up intelligence ahead of the AFC congress. ‘Below please find a first input re S-Korean delegation with initial descriptions of the assignment, private mobile numbers, arrival dates,’ he had written in a report sent to Bin Hammam on 29 April 2009. ‘Photographs are of course also available of the key people. The next report will provide further information about their detailed plans, what those plans are, who they are seeing or planning to see, where and what offers will be made and to whom.’

  Meanwhile, Fernando was busy drumming up the votes Bin Hammam needed to defeat the Bahraini challenger, and his own electioneering methods were far from straightforward. The fixer sent Bin Hammam one report guaranteeing the votes of 12 AFC countries, adding: ‘I am sure of Pakistan and Afghanistan because I sent a mobile phone and both photographed the ballot paper inside the booth and showed it to me.’ The Sri Lankan fixer also received a payment of $23,000 from one of Bin Hammam’s slush funds as reimbursement for a cash gift he had given to Alberto Colaco, the general secretary of the Indian Football Association, after winning a guarantee of his support.

  The coup fizzled out in short order with the help of Fernando and Hargitay. Bin Hammam won the election comfortably at the AFC congress in May 2009. He needn’t have been so worried. Few were surprised when FIFA’s ethics committee cleared all concerned of wrongdoing: that was the way of handling spats in the FIFA family, and no real evidence had emerged to support the startling allegations against Chung. With his presidency once again secure, Bin Hammam could now return to his main focus: Qatar’s bid for the 2022 World Cup. Suddenly, attacking one of the 24 FIFA voters live on television didn’t seem like it had been such a good idea.

  Bin Hammam needed to take remedial action to restore his support base in Asia, and fast. When it came to the football bosses who ran the continent’s national associations, there was often an easy way of patching up fractured loyalties or rewarding longstanding friendships. Hammam made payments totalling $1.7 million to football officials and their federations across Asia from secret slush funds operated by his private company, Kemco, including his daughter’s bank account, in the period before and directly after the December 2010 World Cup vote, and his own re-election as AFC president the following month.

  The core targets of his World Cup strategy, however, were his three fellow Asians on the Exco: Chung, Worawi Makudi of Thailand, and Junji Ogura of Japan. Bin Hammam could count on the unfailing loyalty of Makudi, but Chung and Ogura presented a knottier problem because both South Korea and Japan were also in the race for 2022. In Chung’s case, the rivalry was now not just patriotic, but personal. But Bin Hammam reckoned that if he could be brought around, the pliable Ogura would follow. There was no hope of persuading the two men not to back their own countries at the outset, but no one was expecting South Korea or Japan to make it through the first rounds of voting anyway. What he wanted was to persuade them to swing their votes behind Qatar once their own countries had crashed out. If they agreed, then the entire Asian voting bloc would belong to Qatar in the final rounds that would decide the result. This was the end game Bin Hammam had in sight, but first he had to find a way to bury the hatchet with Chung.

  The Qatari billionaire knew well what motivated his old South Korean foe, because it was a trait he shared. Chung was driven by his thirst for power. You couldn’t buy this man’s support for any amount of cash, but if you could offer him a leg up the ladder he might just consider it priceless. Everyone knew that Chung wanted more than anything to become FIFA president. Bin Hammam was the man credited with getting Blatter elected, and if he could hold out the hope that he might play kingmaker to Chung as well, that could just be enough to secure his loyalty.

  So there was a marked change of tack in Bin Hammam’s attitude towards the South Korean as summer turned to autumn in 2009. The charm offensive was to start here. In October, when Jenny Be arranged for Chung to travel to Kuala Lumpur on AFC business, she made a special effort to upgrade the South Korean’s room at the five-star Shangri-La Hotel to a top suite and ensure he was given a dedicated car. The two rivals breakfasted together in the hotel’s Lemon Garden restaurant on the morning of 24 November, and the meeting marked a turning point. From that occasion onwards, whenever Chung visited Kuala Lumpur, he was to be given the type of lavish hospitality that Bin Hammam reserved for his closest friends and allies. Be later instructed staff in the AFC’s logistics department: ‘Please ALWAYS accord Dr Chung the presidential suite. This is a standing instruction.’ And then: ‘Following my earlier email, please also ensure that the car for Dr Chung is Hyundai (highest range model) or if that is not available, then a Mercedes 300 or 500 model (newest model). This is also a standing instruction.’ The extra cost was all to be charged to Bin Hammam’s presidential a
ccount at the AFC.

  The hospitality was reciprocal. The two men’s assistants were soon arranging for Bin Hammam to travel to South Korea in February 2010 to be hosted by Chung at the five-star Grand Hyatt Hotel with its dazzling views of Seoul’s futuristic cityscape. After Bin Hammam met the South Korean president, Lee Myung-bak, he gushed on his blog that the visit to the Blue House had been set up by ‘none other than my good friend and comrade-in-arms Dr Chung Mong-joon’. It was over dinner on that trip that the two men cemented their alliance. They agreed to undermine Blatter by jointly proposing a change in FIFA statutes to ban presidents for standing for more than two terms, and Bin Hammam announced the move days later at the AFC congress in Seoul. His very public promise to throw his support behind an Asian candidate at the next election for FIFA president was a message to Chung. He later sent the South Korean a letter he had drafted to Valcke proposing the presidential term limit ‘as discussed in Seoul’. The proposal never came to pass, but Bin Hammam had given his new ally a clear statement of intent. If Chung wanted to be president, he needed Bin Hammam on side.