The fight for football’s future
MoS reveals bribery allegations about favourite FBI considering raid and arrests at Zurich gathering Governing body could be disbanded within months
WITH five days until the presidential election, FIFA are approaching a crossroads in their 112-year history and the favourite to replace Sepp Blatter as the most powerful man in world football faces fresh and troubling allegations.
FIFA officials privately concede they fear the FBI could raid Zurich again and haul away yet more of their clan suspected of criminal activity. An FBI source has told The Mail on Sunday that the Feds are ‘cognisant’ that a FIFA Congress with 209 associations in town would provide an opportunity for action.
Sheik Salman of Bahrain, odds-on for now to replace Blatter, will not be among those arrested, if indeed anyone is, but his campaign has been beset by allegations of, at best, indifference to human rights abuses during the Arab Spring of 2011.
There is mounting speculation on the campaign trail that Salman is coming under pressure to withdraw, with key sports powerbrokers in Asia afraid of reputational damage to the region — the 2022 Qatar World Cup — if he wins. But Salman’s lawyers say he has ‘no intention of withdrawing’ and a spokesman insists: ‘He’ll be there.’
The Mail on Sunday has seen hitherto secret paperwork outlining allegations that bribes were offered to assist a previous Sheik Salman election campaign in 2009, when he was fighting Qatar’s Mohamed Bin Hammam for a seat on FIFA’s executive committee.
The claims had gravitas as they were raised by Les Murray, an Australian broadcast journalist who was a serving member of FIFA’s ethics committee at the time.
Murray wrote to Justice Petrus Damaseb, then chairman of the committee but the initial response from FIFA’s general secretary at the time, Jerome Valcke, was to chastise Murray for his approach. ‘This is an irresponsible behaviour,’ wrote Valcke. ‘Far from the stand- ards that FIFA expects of a committee member.’
After Murray followed up with more details Valcke required — names of accusers, dates and times of conversations with them and details of a nexus of people apparently involved in the scheme — he never heard anything back about the case.
Sheik Salman has denied any wrongdoing or having any knowledge of the matter. A spokesman said: ‘Sheik Salman had absolutely no involvement in vote-buying and there has been no evidence suggesting he was involved. Sheik Salman is committed to transparency and has zero tolerance for corruption. He has pledged to work tirelessly to help restore FIFA’s reputation if he is elected president.’
There is no evidence FIFA ever looked into the allegations.
Two sources say that Blatter favoured Salman for most of the 2009 race and would have wanted no interruptions to it. Both sources, from contrasting backgrounds high up at FIFA, have independently told The Mail on Sunday that Blatter changed his mind late on, calling in favours to gain two abstained votes to guarantee Bin Hammam a win.
Blatter has not responded to questions about the issue, but legal sources close to FIFA have told this newspaper there are ‘legitimate questions’ to be asked about the elections in the Asian confederation in 2009 and 2013, including those raised by Murray.
Arguably most significant is the behaviour of FIFA officials when presented with the allegations of bribery. The allegations were, in effect, ignored. Senior contemporary sources inside FIFA at the time say that was the case. A stony silence from the current administration does nothing to dispel that notion.
One source says Sheik Salman is ‘of interest’ to FIFA’s current ethics committee despite being just a few days from a potential coronation but a spokesman said only: ‘Thank you
for reaching out. We don’t comment on this.’
FIFA have been in meltdown since the FBI launched dawn raids in Zurich on May 27 last year, arresting seven FIFA officials on corruption charges two days before Blatter won a fifth term as president. He easily beat Prince Ali bin Hussein in that election. Prince Ali is one of five men alongside Sheik Salman running for the presidency now.
Within days of last year’s election, Blatter stood down as wave after wave of corruption allegations surfaced via indictment documents published by the United States authorities. One of the most serious was that a $10million bribe was paid to help secure votes for South Africa to stage the 2010 World Cup. Another was that Germany bribed their way to hosting the 2006 World Cup.
Crooked TV rights deals in the Caribbean and World Cup ticket corruption dating back 30 years are also ‘major’ issues being actively probed by the US and Swiss authorities, along with money-laundering and bribery allegations linked to the awarding of the 2018 and 2022 World Cups.
A legal source close to FIFA says the world body could be dissolved as a result of decades of wrongdoing. ‘There are so many corruption allegations, it’s a question of prioritising them. The list gets longer by the day,’ the source said.
One intriguing line of inquiry is why a $500,000 payment was allegedly made to a private yacht manufacturer from a sports marketing company’s US-based bank account via a London bank account. A working hypothesis is that the luxury boat was used as a sweetener in a contract award but the authorities have declined to comment.
The five presidential candidates all come with baggage, although all passed integrity checks to be allowed to run. That said, it is understood those checks went little further than a review of public domain information about financial, criminal or ethical convictions. No detailed new investigations were done into backgrounds.
Les Murray’s allegations about Sheik Salman’s 2009 campaign centred on claims that money was being funnelled via national Olympic committees as cash grants in exchange for votes. The broadcaster for whom Murray worked, SBS, even had the head of the Philippines FA, Jose Martinez (now deceased) on camera saying his FA had been offered cash to vote for Sheik Salman. Numerous officials across Asia said they had heard of a vote-buying scam.
In his detailed second letter to Valcke, Murray wrote that he reported the accusations ‘out of a sense of duty and responsibility to football, to FIFA and to the ethics committee of which I am a member. To have ignored them or to have buried them would have been a precise case of irresponsibility and a neglect of duty.’
Murray has confirmed FIFA never replied to him. At the time, Valcke was the man with the ultimate power to decide whether to authorise an investigation or not. He declined to comment but a source close to him says he forwarded Murray’s letter to the relevant people.