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

by Heidi Blake

  Bin Hammam refused to pay the full $1.5 million Naduhl had initially requested and he doubted the credibility of much of the intelligence they provided. But nonetheless he used the private detectives to search for evidence that Blatter was breaking the rules by exploiting FIFA’s resources in his campaign. The Qatari was convinced that Jérôme Valcke, FIFA’s secretary general, was in league with Blatter against him. One report from Naduhl noted: ‘Intercepted phonecalls of the past four days reveal that the FIFA GS spoke to high ranked politicians of two west African states . . . The major issue of both conversations was the upcoming election, when the federations of both states are supposed to vote for JB.’

  Netzle was enlisted to help Bin Hammam apply pressure on FIFA not to allow Blatter to use FIFA’s resources for his own campaign. With the lawyer’s advice, Bin Hammam wrote to Valcke: ‘I kindly request you to ensure that none of the candidates use the funds and or resources of FIFA for their electioneering campaign. FIFA staff if they wish to assist Mr Blatter should resign from their positions before taking part in his campaign.’ Netzle and Bin Hammam kept the pressure up throughout the campaign.41

  Bin Hammam was also developing another line of attack with the aid of Dr Urs Linsi, a former secretary general of football’s governing body, who had approached the Qatari with what he claimed was explosive evidence of financial wrongdoing at FIFA’s headquarters in Zurich. Linsi had been sacked by Blatter back in 2007 and had walked away after only five years in the post with a payment of $6.8 million dollars which many regarded as hush money. The jowly Swiss official was enlisted to work closely with Netzle on Bin Hammam’s campaign, and the men constructed a plot to deploy his information on the eve of the presidential vote to cause maximum damage to Blatter.

  One email from Netzle to Bin Hammam reports: ‘Dr Linsi has disclosed to me certain financial information which is shocking and certainly works in your favour. I agree with Dr Linsi that it is important that the delegates are informed about these figures in advance of the election. However, the current administration of FIFA should not be given too much time to prepare wordy explanations and defence arguments. Your information especially on the financial situation and the misappropriation of funds of FIFA should rather come as a surprise to the delegates.’

  But they never got a chance to drop their bombshell. The entire presidential race was about to be derailed by a firestorm of scandal which would threaten to engulf all of world football.

  Eighteen

  The Riches of Ruin

  Spilling back from the shimmering shores of the Gulf of Paria, Port of Spain is a party city where life bops along to the sound of steel pans, the streets are lined with gingerbread-style fretworked houses and the rum cocktails flow freely. This was where Mohamed bin Hammam had enlisted his old comrade Jack Warner to arrange a two-day lobbying session with Caribbean officials on 10 May.

  The presidential pretender had been enraged when US visa problems had blocked him from getting to Miami for the annual congress of the Confederation of North, Central American and Caribbean Association Football earlier that month. His fury had only increased when he heard that Sepp Blatter had used his own address to the congress to announce a special award of $1 million to CONCACAF from the FIFA Goal Programme, in recognition of the confederation’s 50th anniversary. He was determined not to be denied his own chance to curry favour with so many voters, and Warner had rolled to the rescue.

  The bulk of CONCACAF’s membership came from the 31 football associations that made up the Caribbean Football Union, and, happily, Warner was the president of both organisations. He decided to call an extraordinary congress of the CFU and sent a round-robin to the presidents of each of its member associations explaining that Bin Hammam had asked for a chance to make his case. ‘In keeping with the principles of our beautiful game, fair play and democracy as well as my obligation to the Member Associations of this region, to ensure we are well-informed and in a position to make a decision in the best interests of our members, I have acquiesced in this request,’ he wrote. ‘It is therefore my pleasure to invite you to attend a special meeting on May 10th, 2011 from 10am at the Regency Ballroom, Hyatt Regency Hotel, Trinidad.’

  Bin Hammam had paid Warner $363,000 to cover the travel, meals and accommodation expenses of the Caribbean football bosses he had invited to the junket at the Hyatt on the waterside in Trinidad and Tobago’s capital city. An aide of Warner’s would later recall that he had asked her to come up with a realistic budget to cover the cost of the trip, and then told her to double it before sending the bill to Bin Hammam. The travel had all been booked through Warner’s own company, Simpaul.

  Bin Hammam arrived in Port of Spain on 9 May with his entire campaign team. His loyal FIFA colleagues Hany Abu Rida, Worawi Makudi and Manilal Fernando followed him down the aeroplane steps, with Amadou Diallo and Mohammed Meshadi struggling along behind with the bulging bags. Michelle Chai, the AFC’s assistant general secretary, was there too, pinging messages back and forth from her smartphone with the other aides back in Kuala Lumpur. They all knew that winning over the Caribbean delegates would be crucial, and that they would do what their leader told them. ‘We just have to pray for Jack Warner,’ Chai tapped into one message.

  The party was met by Warner’s staff and driven to the Hyatt, where they checked into the best rooms overlooking the Caribbean waters. They took a stroll round the city, dined heartily that evening, and turned in for an early night to make sure of being fresh for the big day that followed.

  Sonia Bien-Aime was among the delegates who filed into the Hyatt’s dated orange and maroon ballroom the next morning to watch Bin Hammam make his pitch for the top job in world football. She was a spark-eyed woman in cherry-red lipstick whose hair was relaxed into long glossy ringlets, and she stood out like a sore thumb in the all-male world of Caribbean football. Bien-Aime had been elected the first ever female secretary general of the Turks and Caicos FA five years before, and though she was quick to smile and joke with her male colleagues, she was deadly serious about her job.

  She got on especially well with Fred Lunn, the vice-president of the Bahamas FA, and the pair were knocking around together jovially on the trip. Lunn was a small man with a round, cheerful face and a tidy moustache. He was gentle and unassuming, but every bit as serious as Bien-Aime about serving the game of football. They were equally sick of the series of scandals that continually buffeted FIFA and distracted it from its main business, and they knew Bin Hammam was running for president on a transparency ticket. It would be interesting to hear what the man from Qatar had to say.

  The start of the meeting was delayed by half an hour because Warner was running late. When he finally ambled in, Bin Hammam stepped onto the stage dressed soberly in a black suit, grey shirt and striped silk tie. He squared himself at the podium, shuffled his notes, and set off hesitantly into a 40-minute presentation in which he set out his vision for a reformed FIFA in stumbling English. It was the same patter he had repeated many times before, but he was a nervous public speaker and the foreign words did not trip easily off his tongue.

  At the end, he took questions from the floor, thanked the delegates humbly for giving him an audience, and asked them to vote for him on 1 June. Once he had stepped down, the guests were all ushered into the hotel restaurant for a lunch. When they were seated, Warner stood and flashed his infectious grin around the room. He told the delegates that they should head up to the hotel’s boardroom that afternoon between 3pm and 5pm where a surprise would be waiting. They would each be given a gift, he said, for attending the conference.

  Lunn was curious about what was being offered, and he was one of the first officials to make his way upstairs, shortly after 3pm. When he arrived he found the boardroom locked, so he knocked and waited. A tall, handsome man in a blazer and chinos peered out and asked him to hold on a few minutes. It was Jason Sylvester, the CFU’s events co-ordinator. Lunn listened out, trying to discern what was going on inside, but all was quiet. Prese
ntly, the door swung open and he was invited in. A prettily plump woman asked him to sign a registration form, and he realised it was Debbie Minguell, an administrator at the CFU. Sylvester was holding out a bulging brown envelope. It was stapled shut, with ‘Bahamas’ scrawled across the front in biro. Lunn took it, turned it over in his hands, and tore it open. He gasped as four fat rolls of $100 bills tumbled out onto the table.

  ‘What’s this?’ he asked, incredulously.

  ‘It’s forty thousand dollars. It’s a gift, from the CFU,’ said Sylvester cheerfully. Did Lunn want to count it? He shook his head, momentarily dumbfounded. Then he recovered his poise enough to tell them he hadn’t been authorised to accept any such gift, and he couldn’t possibly take it back with him through customs when he flew home to the Bahamas via the USA.

  ‘You could mail it,’ Minguell suggested, helpfully. Lunn peered at her disbelievingly.

  ‘Are you kidding?’ he asked. She wasn’t. The officials told Lunn he should relax and accept the gift, but he wasn’t to discuss it with anyone else at the conference, or let anyone see the cash. Nonplussed, he decided to take it up to his hotel room and call his boss back in the Bahamas to figure out what to do. He took off his jacket and bundled it around the money before hurrying down the corridor.

  When he got back to his room, Lunn pulled out his iPhone and tried to call Anton Sealey, the president of the Bahamas FA, but he got no reply. He sat down on the bed and hastily typed the words ‘Pls call URGENT Fred’ into a text message, then waited. It didn’t take long for the phone to ring. Lunn explained what had happened and asked Sealey if he had heard anything about this gift, which was supposedly from the CFU. Sealey said he knew nothing about it, and told his vice-president that under no circumstances should he accept the money. It must be returned at once, and Lunn should make sure the officials who had given it to him made a note of the fact he had handed it back. Lunn agreed, and hung up. He laid the four rolls of cash out neatly in front of the envelope on the hotel’s mottled stone table top, and snapped a photograph on his phone. Then he shoved the cash back into the envelope, slid the package down his trousers to keep it concealed, and made his way rather stiffly back to the boardroom.

  Lunn found a small throng officials queuing outside when he got there, so he waited in line. Ahead of him was an official he recognised from one of the other confederations.

  ‘Why is this door locked – are there people getting bribed around here?’ the official asked. Shortly afterwards, the same man was ushered into the room. Lunn noticed that when he emerged he was slightly giggling. When it was his turn to go back in, Lunn removed the package from his trousers and handed it over, explaining that he had spoken to his FA president and could not accept the cash.

  ‘We understand,’ Sylvester said, obligingly. Lunn was relieved. He took his phone out of his pocket and tapped out another text to Sealey, confirming that the cash had been returned, and then he went off looking for his friend Sonia, to find out what she had done about the money. It turned out that Bien-Aime had been just as shocked as Lunn to be given a bundle of cash, and had got straight on the phone to her association president, who also agreed she should hand it back. The same was true of David Sabir, from the Bermuda association and officials from the Cayman Islands, whose president Jeffrey Webb had been equally definite that the gift must be returned. The three officials who had refused to be bought watched sorrowfully as their colleagues queued up outside the board room to accept the gifts. A sum like $40,000 was the equivalent of several years’ wages for officials from some of the smaller Caribbean islands. Turning it down was too much of wrench for many. Lunn sent another message back to his boss in the Bahamas.

  ‘Sealey a lot of the boys taking the cash this is sad . . . I’m truly surprise it’s happening,’ he wrote.

  ‘I am disappointed but not surprised,’ came the reply. ‘It is important that maintain our integrity when the story is told. That money will not make or break our Association. You can leave with your head high.’

  ‘Should I save the photo for you to see?’ Lunn wanted to know.

  ‘Of course. I have never seen that amount of money,’ said Sealey. ‘I need to see what it looks like. Lol.’

  ‘It hurt to give it back,’ Lunn admitted. ‘What bill it could pay. But it was the right decision.’

  The same day, thousands of miles across the Atlantic, a second scandal was brewing. A committee of MPs at the House of Commons in London had launched an inquiry into the World Cup bidding process following England’s humiliating defeat, and today they were meeting to discuss a damning file of evidence which had been submitted by The Sunday Times Insight team.

  The journalists had sent the MPs evidence gathered during their undercover investigation the previous year, but never before published, that shone a scorching spotlight on Qatar’s bid. It contained the claims made by the FIFA men the journalists had approached that Qatar ‘had been offering members of the FIFA executive committee large amounts of money for their votes’. The file said that six former and current FIFA officials the journalists had spoken to suggested ‘paying huge bribes to FIFA executive committee members as part of a strategy to win the vote’. The newspaper was concerned that FIFA had made no attempt to investigate repeated allegations that Qatar had bought votes despite being handed their package of tapes the month before the ballot.

  ‘The activities of the Qatar bid had come to our attention a number of times during our investigation,’ the submission said. Ismail Bhamjee, the former African Exco member who had jumped for joy when Bin Hammam announced his presidential run in March, had been filmed telling the reporters that Qatar was offering the continent’s voters between a quarter and half a million dollars each. Michel Zen-Ruffinen, FIFA’s former secretary general, had introduced the reporter to the fixer Amadou Diallo and told them Qatar was using him ‘to arrange financial deals with the African members in exchange for World Cup votes’. Amadou Diakate, another former African Exco member who had become a member of FIFA’s referee committee, had confided that the continent’s voters had been offered up to $1.2 million each for ‘projects’ by Qatar in return for their votes. He said it was normal for a third of such sums to be paid upfront and for the remainder to be collected if the bid was successful.

  Worse still, the evidence contained the claims of a whistleblower who had approached the reporters from inside the Qatar bid committee to allege that the CAF president Issa Hayatou and the Ivory Coast voter Jacques Anouma had been paid $1.5 million each. The whistleblower wasn’t named in the evidence sent to parliament, but this was Phaedra Al-Majid, Qatar’s raven-haired communications advisor who had been discomfited by the activities of her bidding colleagues at the CAF congress in Luanda.42

  Al-Majid had told the reporters she had witnessed the money being offered to the voters by senior figures from the bid in two meetings in hotel suites in Luanda. She said a similar deal had been struck with the Nigerian Exco member Amos Adamu, before he was knocked out of the ballot when he was filmed selling his 2018 vote to the phony lobbyists for $800,000. The money would go to the three members’ football associations, she said, but in reality it was intended for them personally. ‘It was said in such a way that “We’re giving it to you”. It was going to their federation. Basically, if they took it into their pocket, we don’t give a jack,’ she was quoted in the evidence as saying. Hayatou, Anouma and Adamu all strongly denied they had been offered or had received any payment from Qatar.

  The Sunday Times explained in its letter to the MPs that it had not published the allegations against Qatar because they had been denied firmly by the bid, the whistleblower wasn’t then prepared to be identified publicly and none of the FIFA officials they had filmed talking unguardedly would be prepared to repeat the allegations if called as witnesses. But the journalists believed the allegations were credible and that they should have been examined by FIFA. They said it seemed ‘extraordinary that such serious allegations by and about such senior of
ficials were effectively swept under the carpet’ after being sent to Zurich. Now the MPs had chosen to publish the submission themselves under the legal protection of absolute parliamentary privilege, meaning that the allegations could be repeated with impunity. The claims that Qatar had bribed FIFA’s voters to back its World Cup bid reverberated around the globe.

  While Lunn stood watching sadly as his Caribbean colleagues queued up to accept the cash, a major breaking news story flashed onto the TV screens around the hotel. The allegations that Qatar had bribed World Cup voters had washed all the way across the Atlantic from the House of Commons in a matter of hours. The shocking news added a whole new dimension of discomfort for the three officials who had just had to hand back bundles of cash after meeting Qatar’s most senior football official. Lunn would later recall feeling queasy when he saw officials emerging from the boardroom clutching their envelopes with the story rolling on every screen. ‘Witnessing this was particularly troubling because at the same time CNN was running stories concerning allegations of bribes being paid in connection with the awarding of the 2022 World Cup to Qatar,’ he would write.

  After speaking to Lunn, Anton Sealey had picked up the phone to Chuck Blazer and told him what was happening. Sealey wanted to hear if Blazer knew anything about the gift which was supposedly from the CFU. The CONCACAF secretary general leaned back in his chair in his Trump Tower penthouse office, and ran his fingers through his beard. No, he told Sealey. He knew nothing about the bundles of cash being sprayed around in the Caribbean. And what’s more, unless he was very much mistaken, the CFU didn’t have anything like the finances to hand out gifts like that. Something distinctly fishy was going on in Port of Spain. Blazer hung up and speed-dialled Jack Warner. The phone rang out.