by Declan Hill
When Barin was working for Bordeaux, they ran two sets of accounts: the first, the legitimate and public account; the second, the secret blackmarket accounts where they hid money from the French tax authorities. To get money for the black-market accounts, they fiddled the books on the international transfer of players. For example, they would declare publicly that a player would cost 7 million francs; however, the real cost would actually be much less: 3.5 million francs. Then they would take the 3.5 million off their books and put it in secret slush funds. Using these methods, Barin built a trail of secret bank accounts across Europe. It is his claim that the money in those accounts was used to bribe referees and teams in at least sixteen European games for Bordeaux and dozens of transfers for the two teams. However, in the early 1990s, the whole scheme began to unravel. He claims now that he was caught up in a series of political and economic manoeuvres. Bernard Tapie was considered a left-wing politician, so the right wing came after him.
French magistrates tell a different story. Under the French legal system, there is a role that does not exist in English common law: prosecuting magistrate. They can be remarkable investigators, launching independent inquiries with resources and power that most police forces simply cannot match. One of them began to question the hundreds of millions of taxpayers’ money that went to help support the Bordeaux soccer club. Then other magistrates began to investigate the fix that Bernard Tapie and Olympique de Marseille arranged against a struggling northern club, Valenciennes. (They set up the fix without using Barin, which was a big mistake.) Barin, who at the time was one of the biggest player-agents in international soccer, was drawn into the investigation. He refused to submit voluntarily to a cross-examination by the French magistrates and a European arrest warrant was issued. Between 1992 and the winter of 1995, Barin was an international fugitive from justice. There were a series of dramatic escapes in hotels, and rumours that he was tipped off before police raids in Graz in Austria and at the Novotel Hotel in Bordeaux. Finally, on February 23, 1995, German police caught up with him at Düsseldorf airport. He was arrested and extradited to France.
The French magistrates, thinking of the trouble they had taken to get Barin, kept him in prison for five months. It shook him. He appealed to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, protesting the “inhumane conditions.” It was all to no avail. Softened up by his time in prison, Barin appeared before Pierre Philipon on July 11, 1995, promising to tell all if he was released from jail. The hearing featured a dramatic meeting between Barin and Jean-Pierre Bernès, the former general manager of Olympique de Marseille. After four and half hours, a shaken Gilbert Collard, Bernès’s lawyer, came out of the room and said, “Mr. Barin has pointed the finger at the entire organization of world football. It is a system of giant corruption that it is no longer possible to ignore. This dossier is going to touch upon other investigations which will go in all sorts of directions…. There is going to be a tidal wave that is going to submerge the world of football.”
What had shaken Collard was that Barin was not only giving a tutorial in his match-fixing methods, but he was also providing the investigators with receipts, exact financial amounts, and numbers of illicit bank accounts. Between Jean-Pierre Bernès and himself, Barin revealed that Olympique de Marseille’s match-fixing was more than simply a one-off event; it was a pattern of consistent and constant corruption. They had created special slush funds totalling 5 to 6 million francs a year to fix certain key, usually European, matches. At Bordeaux, Claude Bez had paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in gifts and cash payments to referees.
Among other specific examples, Barin and Bernès talked about arranging matches between AEK Athens and Olympique de Marseille in the European Cup in October and November 1989. To fix the first game, which was played in Athens, they claimed they paid the players of the opposing team to lose. The day before the match, Bernès transferred 1.76 million francs into a Swiss bank account controlled by a Panamanian company led by Greek businessman Spiros Karageorgis, who had connections to AEK Athens. For the return match in Marseilles, Barin was in charge of taking care of the referee, Helmut Kohl of Austria. Barin said, “M. Kohl was a big friend of mine. He died in 1992 of cancer. He was employed by the Austrian postal system. He was in financial difficulties. I relayed him the sum of 310,000 French francs or 698,190 Austrian schillings to his Austrian account on the 10 November 1989.”
There were other revelations: receipts purportedly for bribes of 100,000 Deutschmarks to the German referee and linesmen in a European Cup tie; Italian officials being approached before a Marseille match against the Danish team Brondby (there is no evidence that they took any money); and bribes paid to the Russian team Spartak Moscow in the semi-final of the European Cup in 1991.
Years later, one of the Marseille players who also helped fix a match, Jean-Jacques Eydelie, would add to the controversy by alleging that other players had been involved in match-fixing. He claimed that there was a regular pattern, a day or so before a big match: players who had played with the upcoming team would be asked to contact their friends to see if they would “raise their foot a little.” The payments were frequently money and the promise of a transfer to Marseille the next season. Eydelie even writes in his autobiography, I Do Not Play Anymore: A Footballer Breaks the Omerta, that after the final of the 1993 European Champions League, when Marseille beat AC Milan, two players from Milan showed up after the game looking for their payoff. It is a similar claim to the one brought out by Jean-Pierre Papin, another former Marseille player who played on the AC Milan team (“I played for Marseille, I know how these things are done…”), but other Marseille players and coaches deny these accusations, claiming that Eydelie was simply trying to sensationalize his book, two of them even threatened legal action, and Papin later retracted his claim after facing pressure from UEFA.
However, the biggest shock came from Barin’s claim of the sexual accommodation of referees before big European matches. Barin said that he regularly hired a series of expensive Parisian prostitutes, £2,000-a-night women who serviced the referees.
“After word got around among the referees, they were clambering to come,” said Barin in judicial testimony. “All the referees wanted to come here, it was good for the region.”
“What happened when there were three officials?” asked the judge.
“There were three, four, or five hostesses,” Barin replied. “When the refs were greedy, the girls stayed for two nights.”
The audience in the courtroom broke into laughter.
It would be wise, however, not to underestimate Ljubomir Barin. He may seem like a kind of benevolent Santa Claus, bestowing gifts on complicit and corrupt referees. But the men he was working for, such as Bernard Tapie, had some very tough connections. There was a real “Mr. Christmas” as well – that was the nickname of Corsican businessman André-Noël Filippeddu. Bernard Tapie described him to a soccer coach he was trying to influence as “someone you can have confidence in. Him or me, it is the same thing.” Mr. Christmas’s list of friends and business partners extended to Francis Vanverberghe (a.k.a Francis le Belge), a notorious heroin smuggler and blackmailer. Before he was murdered in 2000, Vanverberghe was head of the French Connection, the drug rings that smuggled heroin to the United States in the 1960s and 1970s and provided the inspiration for the two films starring Gene Hackman. Tapie once intervened with a fellow cabinet minister to get Vanverberghe released early from prison. Another of Mr. Christmas’s Corsican business acquaintances was Dominique Rutily, the president of the Calvi football club, a third division squad in Corsica. On March 29, 1996, four men ambushed Rutily and sprayed him with machine-gun fire; as he lay on the ground, two of them walked over to him and made sure they finished the job by shooting him in the head. This mob-style assassination was just after one of his club’s matches. Mr. Christmas’s brother, JulesPhilippe, was named by a Brazilian senate inquiry as being a money-laundering business partner of one Lillo Lauricella, a relative of the
man called the “Treasurer of the mafia,” Pippo Calò. Mr. Christmas himself was later convicted of helping run a violent extortion ring in his native Corsica.
With men like this hanging about, it was no wonder that JeanPierre Bernès, the former Olympique de Marseille general manager, was terrified of testifying. Once, on the stand, he told the judge he was very frightened and wanted police protection.
However, the ultimate defence of soccer insiders Bernard Tapie, Claude Bez, Jean-Pierre Bernès, and Ljubomir Barin, was “everyone was doing it.” Bernès even wrote in his book about “The System of the Win” – “I discovered above all else, that if Marseille wanted to equal the great European clubs … we had to use the same methods they did… so that when the players walked on the pitch, the game was already won or lost!” Throughout their trials, Bez and Barin consistently repeated the allegation that bribing, gift-giving, and sexual favours for referees were simply the accepted way of doing business in the soccer world. Barin claimed that Real Madrid, the richest and most successful soccer club in the world, offered linesmen officiating their matches Rolex watches, costing between £1,500 and £4,000 and he added “Real win all their matches 4-0.”
Their defence did them very little good. Bez died before the start of his 1999 trial. Tapie was sentenced to a year in jail and, upon his release, became the star of a TV show, restarted his business, and in 2001 became briefly the sporting director of Olympique de Marseille. Ljubomir Barin did not go to prison. He was, however, fined 76,000 euros, which, considering one covert deal that he engineered was worth 4.7 million euros, must be considered a bargain.
Let us be clear about the severity of the cases. In that era, Bordeaux and Marseille were the two elite clubs in France. They were shown to be fixing matches in the French league. They were also competing in Europe’s (and arguably the world’s) most competitive tournament. They were shown to be bribing referees and other teams. Finally, one of the soccer world’s top agents testified that bribery, gift-giving, and sexual favours for officials were common practice among other European clubs. So what happened to the tidal wave of investigations prompted by this case that Gilbert Collard, the French lawyer, prophesized? Where were the other investigations? Did the French Football Federation investigate any other team connected with Barin’s allegations? They did not. Did the Union of European Football Associations investigate? They did not. Did any other European soccer association investigate? They did not.
There were years of legal wrangling between defence lawyers and the prosecuting French magistrates, a few days of dramatic testimony, some wry news headlines about “Full bodied Bordeaux” and “Getting your kicks for free,” but really very little was done. The world of international soccer was not shaken. So is it possible that Barin and Bernès were simply, as Barin now claims, caught up in a world of economic and political manipulations?
I went to Switzerland to find out.
The professional sex district of Geneva is tucked into the backstreets between the train station and Lake Geneva. Being Swiss, the red-light area is rather discreet. By day, the neighbourhood seems dominated by drab bank buildings and cheap hotels filled with United Nations officials. It is only after dark that the panoply of sex bars and massage parlours becomes obvious. Michel Zen-Ruffinen’s offices were in the middle of the red-light district. They were on an upstairs floor, and to reach them I had to go through a lobby that smelt of garbage.
Zen-Ruffinen was once the second most important man in FIFA. But when I met him, he was running a small sports agency and law business. (He has since moved to Lausanne, and now has a new job with a larger legal firm, one of whose clients was the G-14, a group representing the richest European soccer clubs. At one point, they sued FIFA, demanding insurance or compensation for club players who are injured while representing their countries in international matches.) A tall, good-looking man in his mid-forties, Zen-Ruffinen has the reputation in some quarters of being an honourable whistleblower. In 2002, as general secretary of FIFA, he came out publicly to allege that his former boss, Sepp Blatter, the president of FIFA, had committed various acts of fraud. After Blatter won re-election to the head of FIFA, he got rid of Zen-Ruffinen, saying that the allegations were not true. The Swiss authorities declined to pursue the matter, saying there was “no behaviour of a prosecutable nature” and that Blatter had acted lawfully. We did not speak about those issues. I was there to ask him about other subjects, namely what it was like to be a top European referee, which he was, before he became a sports administrator. Zen-Ruffinen almost immediately supported Barin’s allegations about the use of sex with referees.
Sex was used. Sometimes it would be the translator. She would come to the room and show that she was not opposed to being with the referee. Then the next morning they would come to him – the club officials – and say, “If you are not sympathetic to our cause, we will let people know what you were doing last night.”
Zen-Ruffinen was at pains to say that he never availed himself of women or in any way took a bribe. I believe him. Zen-Ruffinen has a very high reputation for personal honesty. But he does say that he heard of other people in the referees’ community who did. The other thing he spoke of was the regular attempts to “accommodate him” by giving gifts or bribes.
I remember when I was a referee, I was in Madrid for an Atlético Madrid game. We were taken to “El Corte Ingles” [a huge department store in the centre of Madrid]. It was ten o’clock and the club officials said to us, “Okay, we will be back at one. And until then anything that you buy is on the club bill.” Well, being Swiss the three of us went and had a coffee. But you can imagine if we were Ukrainian or someone from the Eastern Bloc!
That Zen-Ruffinen mentions that the Spanish club Atlético Madrid as a source of bribes is not particularly shocking news. Jesús Gil, the former owner of Atlético Madrid, is known for his colourful approach to life. He began his career working in a brothel. After graduating to the sports industry, he once punched a fellow club director live on national television. He was also convicted to prison terms three times and linked to the Sicilian mafia by Spanish prosecutors. So the possibility that he may have overseen an administration that tried to accommodate referees is not surprising. But Zen-Ruffinen remembers other incidents with other clubs with better reputations, including a time when he was refereeing at one European club, sponsored by an electronics company:
I remember I came back to my hotel room and there was a full electronic hi-fi on my bed! … Attached was a note saying, “We just wanted to show you what was here. But we will send it direct to your home!”
Zen-Ruffinen immediately phoned to the reception and had the electronics removed, but while conducting research in Africa and Asia, I asked other FIFA-ranked referees if the picture that he described of occasional bribe attempts and women being casually offered is true. They all confirmed the stories, and one official described his time refereeing a summer tournament in Korea as “rest and recreation”:
It was good fun in those days. We would go and they would bring in top teams. And they sent us women to our rooms. Or your translator would come to your room. But you know, that was fun. It was just friendly matches. Often, the ways to corrupt you are very subtle. Women are sent, but nothing is said directly. Some countries are simply very hospitable, it is very difficult to draw the lines.
However, another international referee in Malaysia said that the offers of sex were much more direct and much less innocent:
It is always the same. No matter where you are in the world, money will not always get you, but sex will. If you are not gay, you will always want a woman. So they know that and they send women to your room. It happened all the time. After they have sex with a woman, the offer will be made. Sometimes it is the woman herself who does it. They say something like, “You must support me … You must do this and help …” The man feels guilty and does something.
In fact, the invitations to sexual quid pro quos was said to be so common in the 1980s and
1990s among tournaments in the Middle East that referees were given specific warnings before games involving some Arab countries.
I have, however, got ahead of myself. At the time I interviewed Zen-Ruffinen, I had not visited Asia and I was not certain how to evaluate his story. I thought he might simply be upset at the world of soccer. I thought his stories might simply be an oblique way of seeking revenge on FIFA. Even though among journalists Zen-Ruffinen has a reputation of outspoken decency, even though his story had nothing to do with FIFA, and even though it was consistent with Barin’s testimony and interview, I thought it might just have been sour grapes.
Then I went to see the officials at the Union of European Football Associations, popularly known as UEFA. UEFA is the European equivalent of the Asian Football Confederation. The UEFA headquarters is on the edge of Lake Geneva, in Nyon. It is an indication of the European dominance of the world’s game and the kind of money that is available in the sport. The building has a glass front overlooking the lake, and on the afternoon I visited, light came streaming in the building, bathing it in a lovely glow. The two executives I spoke with were friendly and open. They asked that the interview be recorded as “attributable but with no names given.” Under those rules, they were quite candid. One executive simply laughed, when I asked him, about Barin’s and Zen-Ruffinen’s stories of referees being offered women before big international matches:
Oh yes! It was almost a tradition. “Nice ladies,” money, electronics. You name it, they were offered it. It was almost standard practice that the referees were offered women. In most cases, it was difficult to figure out if it was “excessive hospitality” or bribery. It was so bad that it used to be the refs would arrive at the hotel, look at their watches, and say, “The women should be here at six.”