TICKET SCANDAL: THE INSIDE STORY
Maeve Sheehan and Philip Ryan in Dublin and Cathal McMahon in Rio on the bombshell that rocked the Olympic Council of Ireland
THIS time last week, Pat Hickey had what seemed like a surmountable problem on his hands. An Irish man had been banged up in Rio for allegedly touting tickets to the Olympics. The offence carried a fine and imprisonment. The man had inconveniently worked for a company that Hickey and the Olympic Council of Ireland had previous dealings with. There were calls for an inquiry and the Sports Minister, Shane Ross, just off a flight from Dublin, was demanding an independent presence.
Nothing Pat Hickey couldn’t handle. He had an email from his Dublin lawyers telling him that Ross needed to be “put back in box” and suggesting that Hickey didn’t have to say anything that might prejudice the poor Irish guy’s chances. On Sunday night in an upmarket hotel in Rio, Hickey was ready for Ross.
The meeting was in Ross’s hotel. There was Ross, Hickey, Ken Spratt, a civil servant, and Willie O’Brien, the OCI’s vice president. Ross wanted an independent person on the OCI’s inquiry and answers to the tickets fiasco. Hickey wasn’t for budging. “You are being absurd,” Ross told him. Hickey shrugged. As for answering questions, Hickey repeated the mantra that “on legal advice” he couldn’t.
Ross declared himself “stunned” afterwards but the battle wasn’t over.
On Monday, Ross met Christopher de Kepper, director general of the International Olympic Committee. He wasn’t expecting to see Pat Hickey. De Kepper seemed surprised when Ross told him Hickey wouldn’t allow an outsider on the review panel. Hickey, in a change of tack, promised to reconsider.
Kieran Mulvey in Rio, as Sports Ireland chairman, rowed in to secure the deal. On Tuesday night, when a deal seemed close, Hickey phoned to say he would have to run it by his executive board first. Hickey was doing a good job of keeping Ross in his box as he turned in that night. By morning, all had changed.
At 6am police officers, trailed by a Brazilian journalist, Jamil Chade, filed into the Windsor hotel in Rio. They went straight to Hickey’s room and knocked. Hickey’s wife, Sylviana, who is French, opened the door. She told them Hickey wasn’t there, he’d left for Ireland, the police later claimed. Chade thought she looked “nervous”.
“For a second, the police thought that he had escaped but they saw his shoes, socks and his open suitcase which was still in the room,” Chade wrote in the Irish Indepenent last week.
They set off to look for him, searching the gym, the breakfast room, the restaurant — until “someone realised that his (Hickey’s) son was also staying at the hotel and had a room in his name”.
The moment that Hickey poked his head around the door, naked, confused and looking all of his 71 years, marked the turning point for one of the most dominant and domineering figures in Irish sporting life for almost three decades.
The video footage that captured his fall from grace compounded his humiliation, ensuring that these will be the enduring images of Rio 2016; Hickey, in a hotel bathrobe, sitting on a chair and police going through his possessions. They confiscated his passport, his identification, a return air ticket, three laptops and two mobile phones. A hotel doctor insisted on Hickey being brought to hospital because of chest pains as a precaution.
While Hickey was under guard in hospital, Brazilian police paraded their suspicions and their prime suspect’s belongings at press conferences. Hickey was suspected of three crimes: facilitating ticket touting, forming a cartel, and illicit marketing, and police displayed his ID and airline tickets for photographers. On Thursday, he was released into police custody.
In an interview with The Sunday Independent, Commissioner Ricardo Barboza de Souza, head of Rio’s Civil Police Fraud Unit, claimed: “We spoke to Mr Hickey for two hours. He was very evasive in his answers. He wasn’t really saying anything much. He didn’t say anything that led to anything. He was basically seeking his lawyer’s help. Questioning didn’t bring out anything conclusive. He made no confession.”
The impetus for Pat Hickey’s ignominious arrest in Rio came from a cocktail party for wealthy Brazilians the day before the Games opened, allegedly hosted by an Irishman called Kevin Mallon.
In Brazil, it is illegal to sell tickets for the Olympic Games above their face value. If a legitimate ticket holder passes on that ticket to another person who sells it at more than its face value, the original owner of the ticket can face charges as well as the re-seller. Penalties are two- to four-year prison sentences and fines of up to several hundred thousand dollars.
Mallon, who is from Drimnagh, is a director of THG Sports, a company in the global Marcus Evans Group that promotes tickets for corporate events. THG used to be the authorised ticket re-seller for the Olympic Council of Ireland but that relationship ended when THG’s chief executive was caught up in another alleged ticket touting scam in Brazil, this time for World Cup tickets.
According to police, clients were told there would be a hospitality reception at the luxury Belmond Copacabana Palace hotel with champagne, cocktails and canapes. But on arrival, they were sent to the far less plush Next hotel, where they were served nibbles and fizzy drinks.
According to Commissioner Barboza, the clients were rich Brazilians and tickets with a face value of €400 were allegedly being sold for €7,000.
“This whole cocktail reception was just a farce. They were making it look like a hospitality event but that was all just a facade,” Barboza claimed. He said one group spent $60,000 on tickets.
Police confiscated more than 800 tickets — many of them Olympic Council of Ireland tickets — and arrested Mallon along with his Brazilian translator.
Hickey said he had never met Kevin Mallon. “I don’t know anything about him,” he told RTE in the days after the Drimnagh man’s arrest.
But Hickey does know Mallon’s boss, Marcus Evans, the group’s billionaire British owner.
And while Mallon may have triggered the ticket touting investigation, police are eyeing the bigger fish of Hickey and Evans.
In his interview on Friday, Barboza de Souza told the Sunday Independent
‘At a function, Hickey noted how he’d just missed a call on his mobile phone from Prince Albert’
they have identified several hundred emails between Pat Hickey and Marcus Evans and claimed they showed that Hickey was “abusing his position of power.”
“We need to check out these emails a lot more,” he said. “We can’t really say or show all of these emails because there is a legal process. But the one thing we can say for sure is that there is a relationship between Marcus Evans and Pat Hickey.”
Pat Hickey is not generally regarded as flash. One person who has rubbed up against him in sport and in business over the years said his lifestyle in Dublin was modest in comparison to the first-class travel, five-star hotels and fine dining he enjoyed courtesy of being a senior executive member of the International Olympic Committee, which one acquaintance described as “the most elite club in Europe”. In the view of the acquaintance, Hickey gets his kicks from prestige.
He is originally from Phibsborough in north Dublin. He has lived in the same house in Castleknock in west Dublin for many years. He and his wife, Sylviana, are directors of the family businesses, Pat Hickey Auctioneers and Pat Hickey Insurance. Two of their children, Frederick and Corine, were directors of the auctioneering firm until last year. The remuneration for the firms’ directors last year was €35,000. Hickey doesn’t claim the salary he is due as president of the OCI but he gets his expenses covered and an $800 a day while on duty during the Olympics — which has been suspended in the circumstances.
In the OCI, he takes a hands-on role. He does the negotiating on sponsorship deals, such as the deals with Opel and, in recent years, Kia Motors, which have provided him with the personal use of a car along with “vehicle support” for the OCI. His reputation is tough and bat- tle-ready and, according to one acquaintance, he is “good company”. “He is totally nonPC,” said one. “He is a great raconteur.”
His fellow members of the International Olympic Committee include Princess Margaret, the Grand Duke of Luxembourg and Prince Albert of Monaco, with whom Pat Hickey is apparently very friendly. A story goes that at a function one day, Hickey noted how he’d just missed a call on his mobile phone from Prince Albert.
“He is a bit of an anomaly in that sort of world he is operating in,” said one person. “He is an old fashioned guy, he is not flash. This is not the narrative everyone wants to hear. Pat Hickey loves the prestige and status of his membership of the International Olympic Council,” said the acquaintance. “It is one of the most elite clubs in the world and Pat is in it.”
Marcus Evans, although a billionaire, is also considered unflash. He is a low-profile sporting entrepreneur whose companies employ 3,000 people worldwide. He controls Ipswich Town football club. He has offices in Dublin, and lists his address as an apartment in the Four Seasons Hotel in Dublin 4. His executives include the Irishmen Kevin Mallon and David Gilmore, a solicitor, who are both directors of THG Sports.
THG parcels up tickets for big events in hospitality packages that it sells to corporates and other clients.
Hickey and Evans have a working relationship. In 2010, the OCI selected THG as its authorised ticket reseller for the London Olympics in 2012, and later for the Winter Olympics in Sochi in 2014. Before the London Olympics kicked off, Pat Hickey’s son Stephan was “headhunted” by THG to set up an Irish bar for the duration of the Games. When that story broke, Pat Hickey denied any impropriety: “The promoters were appointed six months before they head-hunted Stephan Hickey from his management position at the O2 Arena in London. Stephan is an event management professional who has worked in London for 15 years, and will leave his position when his contract is completed at the end of this year.”
The news coverage of Stephan’s appointment caught the attention of the former Brazilian footballer-turned-senator, Romario. That same year, the popular ‘Senador’ raised concerns on his website and demanded that Pat Hickey and Brazil’s Olympic boss appear before Brazil’s congress to answer questions. Hickey didn’t appear, of course. The Senador’s concerns were noted at the time by Brazilian police — last week Commissioner Barboza gave his concerns the status of a “tip off ”.
Two years later, in 2014, James Sinton, then chief exec-
utive of THG, was caught up in another alleged ticket-touting scam in Rio during the Fifa World Cup. In 2015, the Olympic Council of Ireland had yet to sign a contract with an authorised ticket reseller a year before the Games. The OCI did not renew its contract with THG and two football agents and a mortgage broker entered the stage; Eamonn Collins, Michael Glynn and Ken Murray.
Collins, who has an address in Clondalkin, is a soccer agent. He has a past career as a footballer and manager among lower division clubs and used to manage St Patrick’s Athletic. These days, Collins represents some wellknown players, including Preston North End player Eoin Doyle, and the Irish international Daryl Murphy who plays for Ipswich — Marcus Evans’ club.
Michael Glynn came to Ireland from England and worked on the commercial side of St Patrick’s. According to an acquaintance, he once managed a greyhound racing track in the UK. Ken Murray’s background is in mortgage services and finance.
In April last year, the three men came together to set up PRO10, the company that is now at the centre of the ticketing probe. In response to questions submitted last week, a spokesman for PRO10 said the directors heard in “the middle of last year” that the Rio 2016 ticketing contract was “available”. They applied for it, the OCI sent “a representative” to discuss the contract, and they won. The process took “approximately two months” and involved “a financial commitment” to the OCI.
The Rio organisers allocated the tickets, and the rules stipulated that PRO10 “must have a representative on the ground for collection of tickets”. PRO10 said it complied “with every stipulation in the awarding of the ATR contract”. But the fact that PRO10 did not have its own man on the ground in Rio has been the cause of its current problems.
PR010 has claimed there is an apparently simple explanation for how OCI tickets ended up in the hands of Kevin Mallon, an unauthorised reseller in Rio. PRO10 had to get the tickets to Rio to be collected by its customers. It wasn’t financially viable to send someone out there. Kevin Mallon, who knows the directors, agreed to bring the tickets with him — an unpaid favour from the THG director to PRO10. And that’s how he came to be caught with around 800 OCI tickets.
There was more intrigue when it emerged last week that calls from PRO10’s Rio ticket line were being transferred to the Marcus Evans Group. PR010 explained that the company wanted to ensure “out of hours” cover, and insisted again that there was no commercial relationship between the companies. This raises the question as to why PRO10 got the contract when it could not afford to provide its own representative on the ground in Rio.
THG and PRO10 have repeatedly refuted all allegations of wrongdoing and have welcomed the planned judicial inquiry.
Brazilian police have issued international arrest warrants for three PRO10 directors, Collins, Glynn and Murray, and for Evans, and co-directors of his firms, David Gilmore, Maarten Van Os and Martin Studd.
Some sources suggested last week that the whole scandal would blow over after the curtains came down on the Olympic Games. However, local police are showing no signs of easing up on their investigations. They plan to follow the money and will seek international cooperation to access bank accounts of suspects.
Gardai are sceptical about how far the investigation can go. What is a crime in Brazil is not a crime in this country, as ticket-touting laws have yet to be enacted here. The prospect of any Irish citizen being extradited to Brazil over the scandal is slim to nil, and there is no extradition agreement anyway.
‘In a further humiliation, Hickey has had his head shaved, in line with policy at the prison’
That is cold comfort to Pat Hickey, who embarks on the first weekend of his life in Bangu 10, Rio’s largest prison, while Mallon is entering his third week in custody.
In a further humiliation, Hickey has had his head shaved, in line with prison policy. He won’t know his fate until his case comes before the courts next week, on Tuesday at the earliest, as the judiciary has not sat during the Olympics. Hickey’s wife Sylviana is said to be distraught at her husband’s incarceration and is understood to have remained in Rio. Hickey’s elite club, the International Olympic Committee, has distanced itself, making clear his arrest is a matter for the OCI. He has stepped down temporarily from all of his roles.
The OCI executive, which includes athletes like Sonia O’Sullivan, and John Delaney, head of the Football Association of Ireland, has taken on legal heavy weights Arthur Cox, and is launching an independent review.
Tomorrow the Olympic road show packs up and leaves town, leaving Hickey, one of its most colourful and prominent members, to his fate.