by John Crace
Once in the witness box, Redknapp didn’t disappoint for a minute, delivering a one-man show rich in both comedy and stream-of-consciousness passion. In response to Mandaric’s barrister, Lord Macdonald, describing Redknapp as an average footballer, the chirpy defendant kicked off in fine style, saying, ‘He would say that – he’s an Arsenal supporter.’
When asked why he had called the Monaco bank account Rosie47, Redknapp replied, ‘Because Rosie was my dog . . . she was a lovely dog . . . you would be a lucky man to have a wife as lovely as Rosie . . . and 1947 is the year of my birth. It was like a security code. Like I have to say my mother’s name, Violet Brown, to get access to my HSBC account over here.’ Oops – that was another security code that would now need to be changed.
Had he thought he was due a ten per cent bonus for the sale of Peter Crouch? ‘Well, morally, yes, because Mr Mandaric had said Crouchie was a basketball player and I’d be owing him ten per cent on the money Portsmouth lost. But my new contract said five per cent so that’s what I got.’
Did he remember signing the form allowing Mandaric to transfer money out of his account to America? ‘No. He must have typed it up and I just signed it. Everyone will tell you, I can barely read or write. To be honest, we were playing Man United later that day and I was more worried about marking David Beckham.’
Did he ever ask Mr Mandaric how the investment was doing? ‘Once, after we won at Blackburn. Disaster! He told me it had been a total disaster. Everything had been lost and he’d try again. The lads thought it was really funny when I told them; they said that would be the last I ever saw of the money. To be honest, I never thought about the account again until years later.’
Why had he lied to Rob Beasley? ‘Why should I tell a News of the World reporter the truth? He didn’t tell me the truth. All I was interested in was getting him off my back. We were playing Manchester United in the Carling Cup Final the next day and I could do without a whole load of distractions in the paper on the morning of the game. I was more interested in telling him that it wasn’t a story, that the money wasn’t a bung. Explaining the legal difference between a loan and a bonus was the last thing on my mind.’ And so it continued.
The only time Redknapp cracked was when he snapped at the police officer who had led the dawn raids on his house – along with a photographer from the Sun – and was sitting with the prosecution team. ‘Mr Manley, will you stop staring at me,’ Redknapp said. ‘I know you are trying to cause me a problem.’
How a photographer from the Sun came to be tipped off about the exact time of the raid was just one of the questions that went unanswered during the trial. But whatever the problem Redknapp thought the police were trying to cause, it was soon dealt with as Detective Manley was nowhere to be seen in court the following day.
The picture that emerged of Mandaric and Redknapp wasn’t just of a happy-go-lucky, disorganized business arrangement between friends; it was of another world, the world of professional football, where large sums of money are the norm for the very successful. This wasn’t a particularly easy defence to sell to a jury – many of whom may have been struggling to get by on £20,000 or less a year – and so this point was never once laboured or spelled out. But it was implicit throughout the proceedings. Mandaric was worth £2 billion, Redknapp earned more than £5 million per year and £100,000 was a relatively inconsequential amount that can be easily forgotten. In the year Mandaric had invested and lost the money for Redknapp, he had lost £17 million in other deals. In other failed transactions, Redknapp had suffered an £8 million loss on a property development and had lost his son a considerable amount of money on a dodgy stock market tip.
This idea of attempting to avoid paying an ‘inconsequential’ sum was the unspoken essence of the defence closing speeches. Why on earth would either man go to all that risk and effort just to save about £30,000 in tax? Mandaric had paid £100 million in taxes over the previous ten years and had paid much more than he had needed to for Leicester City and Sheffield Wednesday. They’d been bought after he’d sold Portsmouth, but before, rather than after, they had gone into administration.
Redknapp himself had paid more than £8 million in tax and, if he was really so financially opportunistic, why had he given the £140,000 compensation he was due on leaving Portsmouth in 2004 to a football youth development scheme?
None of these arguments was conclusive one way or the other, as a number of wealthy individuals over the years have been found to have fiddled the equivalent of loose change to them. But they were still relevant questions to ask in response to the prosecution’s closing remarks that the News of the World tape was ‘perhaps the most important and compelling evidence in this case’.
Judge Leonard had missed the mark with his pre-trial prediction of the proceedings being wrapped up inside two weeks – he probably hadn’t counted on the pedestrian style of the prosecution case – and it was well into the third week that the jury were asked to retire to consider their verdict.
During the day or so they were out, the media played the usual game of trying to appear professional and resist second-guessing the result, while doing precisely that among themselves. Some were convinced Mandaric and Redknapp would be found guilty; others dreamed up a nice sideline in conspiracy theories. ‘A London jury will never convict a London manager who is tipped to be next England manager,’ one reporter told me. He may even have been right, but to me it all seemed rather more straightforward. While I couldn’t have put my hand on my heart and sworn I believed they were both definitely innocent, nothing I had heard in court would have enabled me to find them guilty beyond any reasonable doubt.
The jury had been asked to consider four separate counts – two each of tax evasion against Mandaric and Redknapp – but it was all over after the first. The judge had said in his summing up that it wasn’t an option for the jury to find Mandaric not guilty and Redknapp guilty, so when the first charge against Mandaric received a clear ‘Not guilty’ from the foreman, then the other three verdicts were a formality; if the first payment by Mandaric into Redknapp’s Monaco bank account wasn’t an attempt to avoid tax on a ‘Crouchie bonus’, then the second could hardly be either.
As the first verdict was announced, Jamie Redknapp’s eyes reddened as he struggled to hold back his emotions. But Redknapp gave little away. A hug with Mandaric, a shake of the hand with the guard sitting next to him in the dock, a mouthed ‘Thank you’ to his defence team and the jury and he was out of the court. On the steps outside, surrounded by a phalanx of reporters, cameras and microphones, Redknapp said the whole ordeal had been a nightmare and a terrible strain on his family, but you wouldn’t necessarily have guessed it just by looking at him. He was a little more subdued out of deference to the occasion – strictly no one-liners for this lunchtime press conference – but it was another brilliant Redknapp performance. Despite a probable mixture of relief, anger, ecstasy and exhaustion, he held it all together perfectly. ‘That’s all I want to say for now,’ he concluded. ‘I just want to go home and relax with my family.’ And with that, he got into the back seat of a taxi and was off.
As the crowd dissipated and the journalists scuttled away to file their reports, it occurred to me that this was the end of a very long story about corruption in football, one that had begun as whispers over twenty years ago and had developed into concrete charges just over a decade ago. One of the benefits of a ringside seat at the trial had been the privilege of sitting next to my friend and colleague David Conn, the Guardian’s award-winning sports reporter, who probably knows as much about the murkier recesses of the finances of English professional football as anyone. He was the first to point out just how much of a disaster the trial had been for both those tasked with ‘cleaning up football’ and the police. ‘Stories have swirled for years that bungs were commonplace in a national sport drowning in cash since the breakaway by the First Division clubs from the Football League to form the Premier League in 1992,’ he said. ‘The Premier League set
up the Quest inquiry in 2006 after agents themselves, including Jon Holmes, one of the first and most respected, described football’s player transfer business as “like the wild west”. Mike Newell, then Luton Town’s manager, said publicly that bungs were rife. The former England manager, Sven-Göran Eriksson, was also caught in a News of the World “fake sheikh” sting on a yacht, saying, among several other indiscretions, that Premier League managers “put money in their pockets”.
‘The claims had credence, because even before the billions from Sky TV and the Premier League’s commercial revolution, bungs were indeed proven to have been paid. A previous, much more dogged Premier League inquiry – ultimately signed off in 1997 by Robert Reid QC and the league’s then chief executive, Rick Parry – found that after Arsenal signed the Danish midfield international John Jensen, and the Norwegian full-back Pal Lydersen in 1991 and 1992, Arsenal’s manager, George Graham, was paid £425,000 in kickbacks or ‘bungs’ (payments to football managers from agents as ‘thank-yous’ for signing their players) by the players’ Norwegian agent, Rune Hauge. They also concluded that £50,000 in cash had been handed to Ronnie Fenton, assistant to Brian Clough, one of English football’s greatest managers, after Clough sold the striker Teddy Sheringham to Tottenham Hotspur in August 1992. Graham was sacked as Arsenal’s manager and suspended from football for a year. Clough and Fenton were charged by the Football Association with misconduct for other alleged transfer kickbacks, but Clough was spared due to his deteriorating health, and Fenton retired to Malta.’
That practice – of managers wanting a bung out of transfer fees – is often explained by football managers having always been insecure and not well paid in pre-Premier League days; it might now be termed ‘old school’. Quest was tasked with examining all 362 transfers of players in and out of Premier League clubs between January 2004–06, ‘specifically to identify . . . unauthorized or fraudulent payments’. Its investigators produced a report in June 2007 which named some high-profile football agents for alleged lack of cooperation and said seventeen of the deals could not be ‘signed off’. But on close reading, the Premier League’s report exonerated every manager and club official in the Premier League of taking bungs. Redknapp’s revelation in court that ‘quite a few’ managers did not volunteer their bank details to Quest, as he had done – including, fatefully, his Monaco account – cast the rigour of the Premier League’s self-inquiry in a new light.
Conn went on to explain that the City of London Police also hardly came up smelling of roses. ‘The City of London Police is the UK’s lead force for financial crime, a status some experts describe as its justification for remaining independent of Greater London’s Metropolitan Police. The force is part-funded by the banks themselves in the City’s square mile; £4.9 million in 2010–11 came from its police authority, the Corporation of London. Throughout the serial multi-billion-pound collapses of banks around it, which have cost the taxpayer trillions, the City of London Police has arrested no senior banker for any suspected offence. The force has, though, become expensively involved in horse-racing and football.
‘In December 2007, the trial of former champion jockey Kieren Fallon and five other men for alleged race-fixing collapsed, their lawyers accusing the City of London Police of a flawed investigation.’ By then, Conn explained, in 2006, Operation Apprentice had begun and had been broadly reported, following several sensational dawn raids, as targeting ‘corruption’ in football. It ran alongside the other inquiry by the investigation company Quest, commissioned in January 2006 by the Premier League itself, into alleged bungs. These were strongly rumoured to be routine, and would, if proven, constitute a serious corrupting of football’s integrity, which relies on managers recruiting players on their sporting merits. When the raid was carried out at Redknapp’s house by around 30 police officers at 6.06 a.m. on 29 November 2007, Redknapp bitterly recalled that only his ‘terrified’ wife was in and that a photographer from the Sun happened to be on hand. The police investigation at the time was assumed to be a forceful follow-up to intelligence about bungs.
In fact, as Redknapp’s successful 2008 challenge to the legality of the search warrant later revealed, Operation Apprentice was not related to bungs at all. The offices of Portsmouth, Glasgow Rangers and Newcastle United were also raided, attended by massive publicity; Mandaric was subsequently arrested, as was Peter Storrie, the former Portsmouth chief executive, as well as the football agent Willie McKay (a photographer from the Sun had also happened to be at McKay’s Doncaster home at 6.00 a.m.), and David Sullivan and Karren Brady, then the owner and managing director respectively of Birmingham City. Two Premier League players – the midfielder Amdy Faye and fullback Pascal Chimbonda, formerly of Portsmouth and Tottenham Hotspur respectively – were also arrested.
The investigation centred not on bungs but on tax, specifically whether Portsmouth had paid Faye a fee when he signed for Portsmouth in 2003, disguised it by routing it through McKay, and therefore evaded PAYE and NI due on it. Neither Faye nor McKay were ultimately charged with any offence, and Sullivan, Brady and Chimbonda were cleared of any wrongdoing. Storrie was prosecuted, charged with cheating the public revenue in relation to that Faye alleged payment, and he and Mandaric were also tried for tax evasion over an alleged termination fee paid to the midfielder Eyal Berkovic via a company, Medellin Enterprises, registered in the British Virgin Islands. Both were found not guilty.
So the net result of ten years of investigations into corruption – at a cost of millions of pounds to the public purse in the case of the prosecution brought against Redknapp – was a big fat zero. Not a single conviction. Not a single allegation proved. And after the humiliation of the Redknapp acquittal, you couldn’t really see the CPS or the police initiating proceedings against anyone else. They had given it their best shot with Redknapp and failed. If they had had more compelling evidence against someone else, they would surely have already shown their hand. So, as Conn rightly suggested, the Redknapp case looked likely to be the last word on the matter as the CPS was unlikely to risk another high-profile failure.
This obviously raised questions about the competency of both the Stevens inquiry and the City of London Police; if corruption in football was as endemic as everyone had always claimed, how was it possible that they couldn’t come up with one case that would stand up in a court of law? I had my own suspicions – as, no doubt, did everyone else – but I was happy to let others follow that paper trail.
My particular interest was Redknapp himself and it seemed that, far from drawing a line under everything, the case had actually raised many more intriguing areas of discussion; not so much about any illegality – that had been decided – but about his personality, his attitudes and his relationships. What was it about Redknapp that had made the investigators and police go after him not once, not twice, but three times? It was as if he was the modern-day Al Capone of football. Surely he couldn’t have been the worst – or indeed only – player, agent or manager in their sights?
Redknapp had always maintained that the authorities had got it in for him because he was an ‘East End, working-class Cockney’. This didn’t seem entirely plausible, either; not because the police are above making judgements based on lazy stereotypes, but because football is full of other characters similar to Redknapp. They may not all be quite as talkative, but they’re just as working class and open to regional prejudice.
There again, Redknapp does have an uncanny knack of acting as a magnet for prejudice. Within hours of writing an article supportive of Redknapp’s qualities, my inbox was deluged with emails, almost all of which suggested I must be mad. What was fascinating about them was that the most vitriolic came from those who had no interest in or knowledge of football. One from a woman named Helen was a typical example: ‘How could you be so nice about Redknapp?’ she wrote. ‘He’s obviously a crook. He should be in prison.’
I was surprised, to say the least, because I knew Helen well. She wasn’t a Middle England Tory; s
he was a left-wing, foot-ball-indifferent friend and former National Union of Journalists activist who in the past had always stood up for the underdog and the right of everyone to a fair trial. Yet here she was, having read little more than the headlines of the proceedings and heard none of the evidence, apparently certain there had been a major miscarriage of justice. I was less interested in whether she was right or wrong than in why she cared so much. Redknapp wasn’t one of her typical hate figures; he wasn’t a David Cameron, Nick Clegg or Rupert Murdoch. He was just a working-class football manager, the sort of person who didn’t normally even register on her radar. So why the moral outrage?
It might have been because ‘gobby’ people tend to attract extreme responses, and Redknapp is nothing if not gobby, a man not given to using one word when three will do. That made some kind of sense, though not enough. Perhaps she had a gut feeling that Redknapp was being welcomed back all too smoothly into the football family and that his acquittal was going to be used as an excuse to sweep the rest of the game’s dirty financial secrets under the carpet. That made even less sense. Redknapp had hardly been persona non grata in football’s inner circle when he was awaiting trial and, if the Football Association did want to use his acquittal to tidy away other – as yet unreported – grubbiness, it was hardly Redknapp’s fault. So why blame him? Once again, Redknapp was proving enigmatic. The closer I got to trying to understand him, the more elusive he became.
The trickiness had been apparent in his relationship with money, but neither the prosecution nor the defence had gone into it in any depth as it had no bearing on his innocence or guilt. ‘I’m not a greedy man, Mr Black,’ Redknapp had said while being cross-examined by the prosecution. ‘You can ask anyone . . . I’m the least greedy person you could meet.’ And there were ample demonstrations of his generosity: his refusal to accept the £140,000 severance payout he was due when he left Portsmouth for the first time; and the many charities and friends he had supported in his spare time.