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

by Heidi Blake

  ‘Yes,’ came the inevitable reply. ‘Shred anything that you feel is sensitive . . . or could be used to tarnish him.’

  By the end of the month, Bin Hammam’s loyal aides were being forced out of the door. Jenny Be was marched out on 26 July. She wrote hastily to Michelle Chai before she went.

  ‘They have come to collect my laptop and access card . . . I deleted all my emails and files except those in the server (official AFC business). Have you received your letter yet?’

  ‘Not yet la,’ said Chai. ‘Of course delete all la. That’s normal.’

  ‘Don’t leave anything easy for them. Let them work it out for themselves. Hehhehehee.’

  ‘Hahahahahah,’ Chai wrote back.

  ‘Have some fun, life is too short,’ Be told her friend. ‘If you don’t get your letter today then you have more time and can come help me carry my boxes.’

  ‘Aiya . . . more time for what? Hahahahahaa.’ Those were the last messages the pair would ever exchange as colleagues.

  Chai and the AFC’s finance director Amelia Gan were sacked soon after. Two days after her departure, Be wrote on Facebook: ‘The measure of a man is the way he bears up under misfortune. I am proud to walk out of AFC having worked with a great man and true leader.’ Two weeks later, she was still ruminating over the terrible fate that had befallen her beloved president. ‘Never does the human soul appear so strong as when it foregoes revenge and dares to forgive an injury,’ she wrote. ‘So true,’ Shanti commented underneath.

  FIFA rejected Bin Hammam’s appeal on 16 September. A month later, a tape was passed to the Daily Telegraph in London. It had been recorded on 11 May, and showed Warner telling the CFU delegates in Port of Spain that the cash gifts had come from their Qatari visitor. Bin Hammam’s legal team was now preparing for his next appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, and this latest leak gave his reputation yet another battering he could do without. Bin Hammam fumed. This was all part of Blatter’s conspiracy to bury him for good, he was certain of it.

  The man who had brought the World Cup to Doha was feeling increasingly isolated at home. By now, Hassan Al-Thawadi was at pains to disown his former mentor in public. At the start of October, he told the Leaders in Football conference at Stamford Bridge that Qatar 2022 had nothing to do with Bin Hammam and did not condone his appeal. ‘Mohamed bin Hammam is his own man,’ he said. ‘He and Qatar 2022 are completely independent and separate. The appeal is his decision and his steps. We have to ride it out as patiently as having to ride out the whistleblower allegations and others.’ Perhaps Al-Thawadi had forgotten the statement he had written for Bin Hammam back in July, declaring his intention to fight his appeal all the way to the Court of Arbitration for Sport if he couldn’t clear his name before the ethics committee. Such disavowals were a very far cry from the happy days when the bid leaders had described Bin Hammam as their ‘biggest asset’. How far he had fallen since then.

  Meanwhile, back in Zurich, Blatter was busily implementing his electoral promise to set up an independent governance committee to lead the reform of FIFA. On 30 November, it was announced that he had appointed Mark Pieth, a professor of Criminal Law and Criminology at the University of Basel, to lead the new body. If Qatar’s World Cup delivery team had cause for concern when they first heard the news, they needn’t have worried. Blatter was no fool. It was soon announced that Pieth’s panel would be looking to the future; he would ‘not be supervising investigations into the past’.

  Pieth showed he was the man for the job at his first FIFA news conference, saying: ‘I don’t care to rake up all that muck. I think I can be much more use looking into the future.’ The law professor conducted a quick review of FIFA’s practices and published a report in the spring which said its reaction to past scandals had been ‘insufficient and clearly unconvincing’. He believed he had the remedy. The organisation should split its ethics committee into two chambers, one to investigate allegations and another to adjudicate them. Blatter sensed an opportunity. He hailed the idea as ‘historic’ and vowed to implement Pieth’s suggestion forthwith.

  Bin Hammam’s growing team of lawyers had submitted his appeal to CAS, and they were feeling confident. They remained convinced that the charges would not stick in a court that was not controlled by FIFA. The tape of Jack Warner claiming the cash had come from Bin Hammam didn’t prove anything against their client. The man from Trinidad was hardly renowned for his honesty and who knows what scam he might have been trying to pull off.

  By February 2012, it was time for FIFA’s own lawyers to respond to the appeal. They filed a 99-page submission to the Swiss court, which was never meant to be seen by outside eyes. It was a potentially incendiary document. Contrary to Al-Thawadi’s claims that Bin Hammam had no part in the country’s 2022 campaign, FIFA’s own lawyers had noted: ‘He played an important role in Qatar securing the 2022 World Cup.’ They also highlighted the ‘striking similarity’ between the allegations against Bin Hammam and those against the Qatar bid which had surfaced in the House of Commons.

  The submission said the messages Fred Lunn sent to Austin Sealey as the allegations about Qatari World Cup bribes broke on CNN were evidence that he believed the cash he had just been offered had come from Bin Hammam. Citing the ‘SMS exchanges between Mr Lunn and Mr Sealey on 10 May,’ FIFA’s lawyers noted: ‘The breaking story on CNN was about Qatari bribery in football, and they plainly believed that the payment was made by Mr Bin Hammam. There can be no doubt that the very striking similarity was being made by Mr Lunn . . . between these bribery allegations on CNN and what had just happened to him only moments earlier in the CFU boardroom.’

  FIFA’s submission quoted extensively from the video recording of Warner claiming Bin Hammam had been the source of the cash, which had been leaked in October, and contained a section headed: ‘If Mr Bin Hammam was not the source then who else was?’ The lawyers argued: ‘It is self-evident that no other body or person had any motive to provide the gifts. Still less did anyone else have the motive to do it at Mr Bin Hammam’s Special Meeting.’ Bin Hammam’s lawyers scoffed when they read FIFA’s submission. It was laughable to expect a court to convict a man with no hard evidence just because no other culprit had been identified. They were confident of victory.

  Zhang Jilong was watching events unfolding closely from the AFC headquarters in Kuala Lumpur. He had been acting head of the confederation ever since Bin Hammam’s suspension, and the spectre of the former president’s return if he overturned his ban was distinctly unappealing. The AFC had already turned a corner under Jilong, and the vast majority of staff who had not been part of Bin Hammam’s trusted cabal found the interim regime a breath of fresh air. The fact was, however carefully the Qatari’s loyal aides had tried to cover up for their departed boss, Jilong knew there were bombs under the carpet in Kuala Lumpur. So the AFC had quietly commissioned its own investigation into the activities of its former president as he prepared to make his appeal to CAS. The auditors from PricewaterhouseCoopers had arrived in force in February and were trawling through the sundry accounts Bin Hammam had used to make so many payments to his friends in world football.

  The CAS hearing went ahead behind closed doors on 18 and 19 April in Lausanne. Bin Hammam did not attend, but once again sent his team of lawyers in to make his case. At the end of the hearing, Eugene Gulland issued a confident statement. This had been ‘Mr Bin Hammam’s first chance to answer charges against him in front of a court that is not controlled by FIFA’. The US lawyer was hopeful for a better outcome for his client.

  Bin Hammam would have to wait for three months for the judgment, which was due on 19 July. Two days before it was handed down, he was hit side-on by an unexpected broadside from his old fiefdom. The Asian Football Confederation had announced his suspension. The PwC auditors had handed Jilong an excoriating report earlier that week, flagging up Bin Hammam’s ‘highly unusual’ use of the sundry debtors’ accounts at the AFC.

  ‘Our review indicates that
it was common belief that this account was for Mr Bin Hammam personally and that all funds flowing through it were his personal monies,’ the auditors noted. ‘We question why Mr Bin Hammam would conduct his personal financial transactions through the AFC’s bank accounts when the documents we have seen indicate that he already has several personal bank accounts in various countries.’ The auditors had also found that ‘payments have been made, apparently in Mr Hammam’s personal capacity, to a number of AFC member associations and associated individuals . . . Significant payments (totalling $250,000) have also been made to Mr Jack Warner for which no reason has been provided.’

  In reality, what PWC had uncovered was just the tip of the iceberg, but it was more than enough to sink an already listing ship. By happy coincidence for FIFA, the same day as Bin Hammam’s AFC suspension was announced, it had just unveiled the twin heads of its new ethics chamber, the former US prosecutor Michael Garcia as the investigatory chief and the German judge Hans-Joachim Eckert as the adjudicator. The PwC report from the AFC was the first item in their in-tray. It was time to bury the menace of the man from Qatar for good.

  When the Court of Arbitration for Sport finally overturned the life ban imposed on Bin Hammam by FIFA’s committee on 19 July, the joy of hard-fought victory was somewhat muted. CAS said there was ‘insufficient evidence’ against him, so it ‘upheld Mr Bin Hammam’s appeal, annulled the decision rendered by the FIFA Appeal Committee and lifted the life ban imposed’. But the panel said the decision was not ‘an affirmative finding of innocence’ because, although there was ‘insufficient evidence’, it was after all ‘more likely than not that Mr Bin Hammam was the source of the monies’. They feared that his conduct, ‘in collaboration with and most likely induced by Mr Warner, may not have complied with the highest ethical standards that should govern the world of football and other sports’.

  Bin Hammam was weary. ‘My wish now is just to quit and retire,’ he told the BBC afterwards. ‘I’ve served football for forty-two years – this last year I have seen a very ugly face of the sport and of football.’ He said he had ‘one mission’ and that was ‘to clear my name and then I say goodbye’. Almost exactly a year after Al-Thawadi had drafted a statement to that effect, Bin Hammam had finally accepted it was time to go. But first, he wanted to purge the stain that had now been placed on his reputation by his traitorous successor at the AFC.

  A week later, on their first day in their new jobs, FIFA’s new ethics double-act Garcia and Eckert announced that Bin Hammam was to be provisionally suspended while the new investigator sought further evidence of his role in the Port of Spain scandal and probed the new allegations from the AFC. Eckert handed down his reasoned decision for the suspension in August, citing several prima facie breaches of the code of ethics identified by Garcia. He noted that the PwC report listed payments ‘out of the AFC sundry debtors’ account . . . controlled by Mr Bin Hammam to delegates of the Confederation Africaine de Football . . . and a payment made to Mr Jack Warner . . . in the amount of USD 250,000’.

  Garcia had also advised that the report was ‘of relevance to the recently closed proceedings before the Court of Arbitration for Sport’ because ‘contrary to what Mr Bin Hammam had stated in the course of the respective proceedings . . . it results from the PwC report that Mr Bin Hammam had more than only one single bank account at his personal disposal.’ With the new suspension in place, Garcia had the chance to get his teeth into his first big case.

  Bin Hammam was disconsolate. To be shut out again a week after being vindicated by CAS was too cruel a torment for an already badly beaten man. He wrote a letter to the member associations he had once ruled over in Asia, saying that the payments he had made had come out of his own bank accounts and were driven by a desire to help those in need. His letter cited five people from Bangladesh, Nepal and Kyrgyzstan whom he said he had helped, including two who had since died of cancer, one who had open-heart surgery, another for tuition fees for a FIFA programme, and the family of a 16-year-old from Nepal who died while playing football.

  ‘Let me declare that as a human being with the personal means to help and coming from a culture and society where this is seen as a duty, I am proud of these accusations, and I welcome them,’ he wrote. This was, he said, ‘yet another attempt by Zurich through the infinite tools and power of FIFA to diminish and insult Asia’s name by attacking me directly following the annulment of my previous FIFA ban by the Court of Arbitration for Sport’.

  A second appeal to CAS, this time to overturn the temporary ban, failed in September. And now Garcia and the investigators at the AFC were pulling Bin Hammam’s world apart piece by piece. News reached him that Amelia Gan, his former AFC finance director, had come under investigation by the Malaysian police over the theft of a financial document relating to a payment he had received. The AFC had informed police that the document was missing, and Gan’s husband Kong Lee Toong was arrested and charged with theft. Bin Hammam’s AFC trio had all taken refuge in the Gulf since they had been forced out of their old jobs in Kuala Lumpur: Gan and Jenny Be were both now employed by the Qatar Stars League, headed by Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa bin Ahmed Al Thani, while Michelle Chai was director of club licensing for the professional league in the United Arab Emirates. Bin Hammam hated to see them dragged into this awful mess.

  He was relieved when Malaysian prosecutors eventually dropped the charges against Lee Toong, without explaining their reasons, but things got worse at the start of October, when FIFA announced that Najeeb Chirakal had been banned from football. The unswervingly faithful aide had refused to co-operate with Garcia in any way when the investigator demanded information and documents about his master. Chirakal was ‘banned by the FIFA Ethics Committee from taking part in all football-related activity, at any level, due to his lack of collaboration with the ongoing investigation proceedings opened against Mohamed bin Hammam’, the official statement read. ‘This failure to cooperate constitutes a breach of the FIFA Code of Ethics. The ban is effective immediately and will last for two months or until Chirakal cooperates with these proceedings as requested, whichever is earlier.’ Bin Hammam’s right-hand man never buckled under the pressure, and so his ban was never lifted.

  Then, on 12 November, a new storm broke over Qatar’s World Cup bid. The Sunday Times had obtained documents proving that the Al-Thawadi brothers had offered the son of Amos Adamu $1 million to host a dinner. All parties claimed the payment had fallen through, but the newspaper’s damning documents were sent to FIFA headquarters and passed to Garcia. It was the last thing Qatar, or Bin Hammam, needed. After the latest scandal broke, the Emir pulled the plug on any further attempts to clear Bin Hammam’s name. Sheikh Hamad had told him it was time to give in. Qatar couldn’t fight on so many fronts. The battle had to come to an end, and he didn’t want to hear any more from Bin Hammam on the subject of world football.

  Michael Garcia submitted his final report to Eckert on 6 December. He had not found a scrap of extra evidence implicating Bin Hammam in the Port of Spain bribery scandal beyond that which had already been rejected by CAS, and so the case of the mysterious brown envelopes that had dashed his presidential hopes had been closed. But, now, FIFA was armed to the teeth with documents from the AFC which were enough to annihilate him. The Emir had made his wishes clear, and so before FIFA had a chance to ban him for life again, Bin Hammam quietly resigned on 15 December 2012. But FIFA was not taking any chances. This time, they were going to kill him off for good.

  Two days after his resignation, world football’s governing body released a statement on its website. ‘In view of the fact that under the new FIFA Code of Ethics, the FIFA Ethics Committee remains competent to render a decision even if a person resigns, the Adjudicatory Chamber decided to ban Mohamed bin Hammam from all football-related activity for life,’ it said.

  ‘This life ban is based on the final report of Michael J. Garcia, Chairman of the Investigatory Chamber of the FIFA Ethics Committee. That report showed repeated violat
ions of Article 19 (Conflict of Interest) of the FIFA Code of Ethics, edition 2012, of Mohamed bin Hammam during his terms as AFC President and as member of the FIFA Executive Committee in the years 2008 to 2011, which justified a life-long ban from all football related activity.’

  And then, for the avoidance of any doubt, the statement made it clear he was never coming back. ‘Mr Mohamed bin Hammam . . . will never be active in organised football again.’

  Twenty-One

  After the Story, the Civil War

  The moment had arrived. Summer had set in, the rulers of world football were about to descend on São Paulo ahead of the Brazil World Cup, and it was time for the journalists to push the button on the biggest story of their lives. Blake and Calvert had been frantically writing all week, pulling together the mountains of material they had gathered into a series of long articles, graphics, timelines, fact-boxes, document ‘rag-outs’ and side-panels for The Sunday Times edition of 1 June 2014.

  The amount of space which had been made for the stories in the paper had swelled as their editors back in London had come to comprehend the enormous scale of the evidence. On Tuesday they had been asked to write enough to fill four full pages. That was already way in excess of the usual amount of room given to an Insight investigation, but by the end of the day it had grown to six. On Wednesday it was eight pages, then ten, and by Thursday morning it had been decided that the first 11 pages of The Sunday Times would be devoted to the astonishing story of the FIFA Files. That sort of coverage of a single topic was, as the paper’s head of news Charles Hymas told the reporters, ‘unprecedented outside a war’.

  The stillness that had hung over the little attic bunker while the journalists had searched through their vast haul of documents was blown away by the mounting sense of urgency as the deadline approached. The source looked on in bewildered amusement when he popped in to find the attic suddenly full of the frenetic activity, raised voices and hammering of computer keys of a miniature newsroom on deadline. Calvert, who had learned to type on a metal Olivetti, had bashed out the tens of thousands of words he had to write so hard that his keyboard had to be junked and replaced halfway through the week. Blake sat bolt upright, her fingers flying over the keys, with a clenched expression of controlled panic as she reeled off page after page of copy with the deadline rushing ever closer.