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

by Heidi Blake

  The prompt reminded Temarii to say that his vote was ‘not about the money’, but his subsequent comments suggested otherwise. He was voting for Australia because its government had given the Pacific region almost $1 billion for infrastructure projects and education initiatives to improve living standards in the impoverished islands. He owed a debt of gratitude to the Australian taxpayers. Since the Oceania football confederation was dependent on cash from FIFA for 95 per cent of its revenue, it needed to base its decision on which World Cup hosts would maximise television revenues for the sports body. Temarii had been given a private briefing by ‘FIFA directors’ who had told him that the most profitable outcome would be a European World Cup in 2018 and the USA in 2022, which would pave the way for the growing economic giant China to make a bid for the 2026 tournament. ‘Then we feel we would have the guarantee of revenues for the next twenty years,’ he said.

  But did the Australians give Oceania any money for football, the lobbyist enquired? His answer was illuminating. ‘They do,’ Temarii responded, ‘but it is peanuts if I compare with the proposals that are coming from the other bidders. It’s nothing, nothing. With some bidders we are talking about ten to twelve million US dollars.’ He added: ‘But I will not vote for this bidder that proposes twelve million.’ Was that bidder Qatar? the reporter wanted to know. ‘No, I can’t tell you,’ he replied.

  The lobbyist asked whether he could tell his consortium that Temarii would definitely pledge his second vote to the US if it funded his academy project. There was a flicker of discomfort across Temarii’s features. ‘I cannot say that, because then we will have to face an ethics committee,’ he said. But he asked the lobbyist to inform the consortium that it ‘made sense’ for the World Cup to go to America for three reasons. The first was the TV revenue that would be generated: ‘Only for that reason we should vote for the States, whether you give us the money or not.’ The second was that he admired Sunil Gulati, the leader of the US bid, as a man of integrity who might be propelled onto the FIFA executive committee if his country was successful. ‘And then the third reason why we could vote for the States,’ he said, ‘is because this kind of support coming from a private company would be useful, helpful for us.’

  Temarii then asked whether his academy project could be financed before the vote, and offered to fly to America in mid-October to discuss it with the consortium. ‘I will tell them, it makes sense for the States, and then it is up to them to decide if they want to assist us or not.’ The financial assistance could not be directly linked to his vote but he understood that it was a delicate matter. He asked for future communication to be over the phone and not written down.

  There was one mystery remaining. Which bidders had offered $10-12 million to Oceania for Temarii’s vote? Temarii voluntarily returned to the subject near the end of the meeting. ‘I can tell you that there is a huge proposal. Two, two, huge proposals,’ he said. The money was to ‘build academies, here and in the region,’ and he elaborated: ‘They made the proposal in South Africa, so I have to meet them in October, November. They then come to Tahiti, my home country.’

  At that time, arrangements were already underway to welcome Qatar’s delegation to Pape’ete, the Tahitian capital. Three weeks earlier, Tai Nicholas had sent an email to Bin Hammam’s assistant Najeeb Chirakal. ‘Hi Najeeb, I hope this email finds you well. We have moved offices and I cannot locate the business cards for His Excellency Sheikh Mohammed bin Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani and Hassan Al-Thawadi. I need the email addresses of these two so that the OFC President can invite them and the Qatar Bid team to Tahiti in November. Kind Regards, Tai.’

  The Qatar delegation was coming to Tahiti in exactly the same period when Temarii was expecting to be visited by bidders he said had made him a ‘huge’ offer. How many other contenders was he meeting in those last crucial weeks before the big ballot? What were the Qataris there to discuss? There were certainly grounds for FIFA’s ethics committee to investigate the alleged offers further when they received the package of tapes from The Sunday Times. But their inquiry concluded without ever getting to the bottom of Temarii’s claims about the mystery bidders who were coming to see him.

  The ethics committee had deemed that Temarii was not guilty of accepting bribes. But they threw the book at him anyway, because he had been disloyal in spilling the secrets of the World Cup ballot, and had broken some other ‘general’ unspecified rules. Like so many decisions taken by world football’s taciturn governing body, the reasoning of the committee remained hidden from public view. Not even the Tahitian himself was informed as to how exactly he had broken the rules. The suspension was devastating for Temarii when it was confirmed on 18 November. He was angry to be punished by his friends in Zurich, but not nearly so furious in public as his firebrand Paris-based lawyer Géraldine Lesieur, who vented her gallic rage against The Sunday Times, calling its journalists ‘crooks’ and ‘fabricators’. Lesieur was in no doubt that her client had been shabbily treated and would be making an appeal against his suspension to the Court of Arbitration for Sport in Lausanne. However, this was to cause a big headache for his Oceania confederation.

  Oceania did its best to punch above its weight in world football. It was made up of only ten Pacific islands, plus New Zealand, and its national teams were inconsequential on the football field, especially since Australia had departed to join Bin Hammam’s Asian confederation. The single vote in the World Cup ballot therefore meant an awful lot to the confederation as it was one of the few privileges that gave it leverage within corridors of football power. Oceania’s executives had not lost hope that one of their members could participate in the ballot, even with Temarii blacklisted. They moved quickly to install David Chung as acting president – a Malaysian who had emigrated to the south Pacific as a young man with a logging company and had found his true calling as a football administrator. The man Oceania was putting forward to replace Temarii as a FIFA vice-president represented Papua New Guinea – an island with the dubious distinction of fielding the joint-worst national side in the world.

  With David Chung at the helm, Oceania approached FIFA to beg for him to be allowed to replace Temarii on the executive committee in time for the ballot. FIFA would oblige only if Temarii resigned his seat and dropped his appeal against the suspension. There was only one solution for Oceania: Temarii had to be persuaded to abandon the appeal for the good of his confederation and step down to make way for Chung. This was a tormenting decision for Temarii, who was at home in Tahiti as the events were unfolding. Should he sacrifice the hope of an appeal which might restore his reputation and his job, or should he bow out now as his colleagues wished? Having lost his FIFA salary, how would he even afford to fight the appeal? He couldn’t do it alone. But Temarii would soon find out he had a very powerful friend in Doha.

  Bin Hammam had sent Temarii a message of support within minutes of the ‘World Cup votes for sale’ story being published in October. ‘Dear friend,’ he wrote. ‘Hope this mail finds you in good health and spirits. Having heard the news of Sunday Times I would like to extend to you my full confidence and support. Rest be assured that you have a brother in Qatar. Best regards, Mohamed.’ As Temarii agonised about his predicament on 21 November, three days after his suspension, he clicked reply to Bin Hammam’s email. ‘Dear Mohammed,’ he wrote, ‘Could you please give me your mobile phone to call you? Bests regards, Reynald.’ Bin Hammam was on the phone to his Tahitian friend within a couple of hours. The next day, he spoke to Temarii again with his office door firmly closed. His staff had observed that he was in a temper that morning and they listened out anxiously to try to deduce what was wrong.

  ‘His mood already off now,’ one of the AFC secretaries said to Jenny Be in a message.

  ‘Let’s be careful today and make sure we do our best to smooth things around,’ Be replied. ‘Don’t want to make him more angry or stress.’

  Bin Hammam arranged to meet Temarii in Kuala Lumpur that weekend for a proper face-to-face
discussion. This would be a chance for the billionaire to restore the beleaguered official’s battered spirits with some especially pampering hospitality. He sent out instructions to his staff that Temarii and his companion Lara Farahei were to be treated as the ‘president’s VVIP [very very important] guests’. They were to be flown first-class to Malaysia on 25 November and the $19,975 bill for the flights would be paid from his daughter Aisha’s slush-fund account at Kemco. The reason stated for the payment was simply ‘business promotion’. When they arrived, a chauffeur-driven car was to be put their disposal for the entire trip which, along with their club suite at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, would be paid for by Bin Hammam. No expense was to be spared to make Temarii and his companion feel welcome.

  The meeting between Bin Hammam and Temarii took place in private the following day. The Qatari could see his guest was in a tight spot, and he knew how to exploit a weakness. The billionaire used all his powers of persuasion to push the Tahitian to resist the pressure to step down and instead press ahead with his appeal. If Temarii stuck to his guns, all his legal costs would be covered by Kemco. It was a tempting offer for the man from the Pacific. He was no fool, and he could see that Bin Hammam was manipulating the ballot in favour of Qatar, but he treasured his position at FIFA’s top table too greatly to wave away this offer of the resources he needed to fight. Still, he would face a bloody battle with his colleagues in Oceania if he refused to stand aside and deprived them of their vote. The meeting with Bin Hammam gave him much to consider.

  Meanwhile, the aides at the AFC were worrying about how to dress up Temarii’s visit in public. Michelle Chai asked Jenny Be what she should say about why he had come, if she was asked for a statement by the media.

  ‘It’s OK, just courtesy call,’ Be replied.

  ‘I received my good friend, President of the Oceania Football Confederation and FIFA Executive Committee member, Mr Reynald Temarii at the AFC house . . . and we spoke about how FIFA kicked him out,’ Chai joked. ‘One liner is like leaving someone hanging. Because if people read, due to the fact it is Temarii, of course next question is . . .So?? What you discuss.’

  ‘Hahahhaa. Football in general?’ was Be’s suggestion.

  ‘I thought,’ said Chai. ‘But even then . . . the guy is suspended. Never mind la. Just leave one liner. Safest one I supposed.’

  ‘If the guy is suspended he cannot have friends?’ asked Be.

  ‘Can have friends, but what’s the point to discuss football? ’Cause he’s supposed to be suspended for one year from football . . . the “what we discuss” bit is a bit of a headache.’ Be thought it was safest to let the boss handle that question.

  ‘Hahahaha – let him finish that,’ she advised.

  Originally it had been planned that Temarii would stay in Kuala Lumpur for two days, but he had to cut short his trip and take the 9.30pm flight to Auckland on the Friday night because Oceania’s executive committee had called an emergency meeting to discuss his fate the following day. The World Cup ballot was now just five days away. The meeting resulted in bad news for Temarii, as his colleagues decided that he must be replaced by David Chung. To soften the blow, they offered to delay Oceania’s next congress until December 2011 so that the deposed president could apply for re-election once he had served his full suspension. In a statement issued after the meeting, Oceania said its ‘committee believes it has the right to appoint a replacement FIFA vice-president for the remainder of the term. An enquiry has been made to FIFA to seek further clarification on this.’ Chung was told to get on a flight to Zurich in the expectation that FIFA would allow him to take part in the ballot on 2 December.

  Temarii was wobbling under the pressure that weekend and was considering tendering his resignation if FIFA would only tell him what confidentiality rules he had broken. His fiery French lawyer, however, was not so lily-livered. ‘He gives up his rights and sacrifices himself, or he sticks by his guns and that will be held against him that the OFC did not vote,’ Lesieur fumed in a press interview. ‘If he is obliged to [waive his appeal], then it will be true blackmail.’

  On the Monday morning Temarii sent a doleful email to Bin Hammam. ‘Dear Mohammed, can you call me,’ he wrote simply. He wanted to arrange a telephone call between his Qatari friend and his lawyer. By now, the other bids were descending on Zurich and the world’s media were confidently predicting that there would be 23 votes in the ballot, with David Chung stepping in for Temarii. Andy Anson, the chief executive of the England bid, was delighted as Oceania was widely expected to favour his country in the 2018 ballot. Frank Lowy, the leader of the Australian bid, was similarly confident. ‘I understand that Oceania is going to get a vote,’ Lowy briefed reporters from his hotel in the Swiss city, ‘I understand that FIFA will accept the person that is representing Oceania. It requires Temarii not to lodge an appeal.’

  Bin Hammam was trying urgently to get hold of Lesieur to find out what was happening with Temarii but, before they talked, she sent him the email he had been dreading. ‘Dear Sir, Reynald Temarii yesterday took the decision to step down. I have requested him to delay his decision by 24 hours . . . I would like your help to convince Reynald not to give in to the pressure. Yesterday I already tried to get you to join on your mobile. I propose to you that I will call you at 19h Kuala Lumpur time (12h from Parisian time), knowing that there remains very little time before Reynald makes his decision,’ she wrote in French.

  Bin Hammam managed to work his magic. Later that afternoon Lesieur released a statement to the media saying that Temarii had now decided that he would not stand down. Temarii was quoted saying: ‘Despite pressures and issues at stake for the OFC, I decided not to waive this fundamental right to restore my honour, dignity and integrity following the calumnious accusations I suffered from The Sunday Times.’

  The announcement was heavily criticised in Oceania and Australia, with one media outlet accusing Temarii of sabotaging the antipodean bid. But there would have been uproar and mutiny if the other countries in the World Cup race had known what had really taken place at the meeting in Kuala Lumpur a week earlier. Bin Hammam had cut a deal to bankroll Temarii’s legal fees explicitly to keep Oceania out of the ballot. The billionaire was to pay €365,540 to Temarii in the next five months. It wasn’t just Lesieur’s bills he was covering: the Qatari also paid off Temarii’s €4,000 fine for his breaches of FIFA’s ethics code, picked up his travel expenses, and footed the bill for the services of a company called JCB Consulting International, which was carrying out private detective work on his behalf.

  The payments, including the legal fees, were all channelled through the Swiss-based JCB Consulting. The first message to Bin Hammam from the company’s director said: ‘Per Mr Temarii’s request, please find attached the current provisional budget for Mr Temarii’s defense and the bank account details of my company following the signing of an administrative and financial management agreement between us.’ It set out Temarii’s expenses dating back to October and included €260,000 in fees for Lesieur. JCB also took its cut of €30,000. Kemco paid JCB Consulting €200,000 in February 2011, using Bin Hammam’s daughter Aisha’s account. A second payment of €105,000 was made in April 2011 from a $1 million slush fund operated by one of his closest business associates.

  It was a small price to pay to level the pitch again after the setbacks Qatar had suffered. By slamming the FIFA boardroom door in David Chung’s face, Bin Hammam had effectively nullified the damage caused by the loss of Amos Adamu. Qatar had lost a voter, but so had two of its biggest rivals. Now the secret ballot he had been anticipating for so long was almost upon him, and his country’s World Cup bid was back on track.

  Fifteen

  Who Watches?

  A clattering on the street outside jolted Calvert out of his immersion in the strange saga of Reynald Temarii. He leaned forward and pressed his eye to a tiny gap in the plastic sheeting covering the window. The full moon cast long pockets of impenetrable shadow across the street, and the
scene was still. Then a discarded drink can rattled along the kerb in a puff of breeze, and Calvert’s shoulders loosened. The journalists had been warned a couple of days before that someone might have been hired to keep watch on the office, and it was easy for paranoia to take grip after months holed up in the attic. But now something was shifting in the blackened doorway opposite. Was that a human shape, crouching in the shadows? He told himself not to be ridiculous. It was sure to be a fox, scavenging in the bin bags outside the chip shop. This was like being five years old again, and scared of the dark.

  Calvert and Blake were dealing with a massive leak of confidential data on an unprecedented scale, and the nightmare was that powerful figures in world football might rumble their source. Earlier that week, the whistleblower had taken a call from a friend in the security industry who had picked up rumours that a private contract had been put out to spy on him. It was not clear who might be watching, or why, but if it was true then he could have been followed to this very building, and the source would be blown if the journalists were spotted here too and identified.

  They were now taking even greater precautions to keep their whereabouts under wraps. The windows were blacked out with strips of opaque plastic behind the thick blinds, and the weary reporters slipped in and out of the building’s back exit under cover of darkness each night, and crept back in at dawn with their hoods up and their heads down. The source was equally cautious, regularly having the computer system they were using scanned for unwanted intrusion. Since the telephone tip-off a few days before, there had been no real signs that anyone was spying. But that could change at any moment.

  Calvert drew away from the window and flopped back in his chair, tipping his head back and pressing the balls of his hands into his tired eyes. It was past midnight again and the journalists were still trawling the documents under the attic’s harsh fluorescent lighting. There were just two weeks to go before their deadline to deliver the story, on the eve of the Brazil World Cup, and the pressure was bearing down on them heavily. He tapped his password back into his computer and shifted closer to the screen. Both he and Blake had become fascinated by the lengths Mohamed bin Hammam had gone to in order to knock out Oceania’s World Cup votes, and they had spent many hours piecing together the timeline of the secret talks leading up to Temarii’s refusal to resign, and the payments that followed. Blake had moved on now to unravel a string of bribes Bin Hammam had paid to football officials in Asia, but something about the deal with Temarii was still niggling at Calvert, and he was flicking again through the lawyers’ bills the Qatari had paid to keep the Tahitian voter fighting.