Investigative journalist who uncovered corruption within international sport

Andrew Jennings was a leading British investigative journalist who exposed multimillion-dollar vice and bribery in the upper echelons of two of the world’s biggest sporting organisations – the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the Fe´ de´ ration Internationale de Football Association (Fifa).

Memorably unkempt, with a scruffy dress sense, Jennings was nonetheless considered one of the finest investigative reporters of his generation. The Washington Post once described Jennings, whose reporting also targeted London’s police force and the

Italian mafia, as a combination of

Watergate journalists Bob

Woodward and Carl

Bernstein, with ‘‘a touch of a Scottish burr and plenty of flannel’’.

‘‘If you could choose only one person to embody the growing public awareness about the economic and political abuse of sport, of athletes and of fans, that . . . person would be Andrew Jennings,’’ said Jens Sejer Andersen, international director of Play the Game, an organisation promoting ethics in sport.

Jennings’ investigative books and TV documentaries helped lead to the downfall of two of the most powerful figures in sport – IOC president Juan Antonio Samaranch and Fifa president Sepp Blatter. He had found out that Samaranch supported the fascist forces of General Francisco Franco during the 1936-39 Spanish Civil War, had been photographed giving the fascist-Nazi right-arm salute and had led the IOC for 20 years with a mix of corruption, greed and mismanagement.

After Jennings published books about IOC corruption, starting with Lords of the Rings: Power, Money and Drugs in the Modern Olympics, co-written with Vyv Simpson, both authors were given suspended five-day jail sentences in Switzerland, for ‘‘defaming the IOC’’. Jennings followed up with two other books uncovering corruption in the Olympic

body, including The Great Olympic Swindle

(written with his partner, Clare Sambrook).

Those books helped throw light on the socalled Salt Lake City scandal involving allegations of bribes used by the Salt Lake Organising Committee to win the 2002 Winter Olympics. Samaranch was eventually forced to resign in 2001. By then, Jennings had moved on to his next target, Fifa, the governing body of world football.

During an interview with the Post in 2015, Jennings described Blatter as ‘‘a dead man walking . . . These scum have stolen the people’s sport, the cynical, thieving bastards.’’ Hours later, Blatter resigned.

Jennings had first set his sights on Blatter in 2001, three years after he took over as Fifa president. At a news conference in Zurich, he grabbed a microphone and asked: ‘‘Mr Blatter, have you ever taken a bribe?’’ A few weeks later, an anonymous caller told Jennings to be at an office block in Zurich at midnight. There, a senior Fifa official handed him what Jennings called ‘‘a wonderful armful of documents’’ revealing that Fifa executives had been pulling in tens of millions of dollars in return for TV rights and sponsorship deals. The lucrative assignation of World Cup venues depended on the highest bidder.

Jennings’ 2007 book Foul! The Secret World of FIFA: Bribes, Vote-Rigging and Ticket

Scandals revealed widespread corruption. He showed that, in return for voting for Blatter as Fifa president, officials from national soccer federations received bribes, advertising and TV rights, priority in choosing tournament venues, and huge allotments of World Cup tickets that they could sell for profit.

Blatter, who survived in the job until 2015, was indicted in Switzerland but never convicted, although the new Fifa regime barred him from involvement in world football and fined him one million Swiss francs for granting himself huge bonuses over the years.

In 2009, Jennings got another anonymous phone call. When he showed up at an office in London, as asked, his hosts turned out to be from the FBI and the US revenue service, looking for evidence against Fifa. The US Justice Department indicted nine Fifa executives and five business associates for racketeering and money laundering, including Trinidad and Tobago politician Jack Warner, an ex-Fifa vice-president and close ally of Blatter.

Jennings was born in Kirkcaldy, Scotland, and grew up in the London area. His father was a headmaster, and his mother a homemaker. He attended university and worked at the Burnley Evening Star before joining the

Sunday Times’ Insight investigative team. During the 1980s, Jennings investigated cocaine trafficking and mafia murders in Sicily. By 1986, he was working for BBC radio’s Checkpoint series, where he charged that corrupt police officers at Scotland Yard were involved in drug smuggling. When the BBC pulled the plug on the programme, Jennings quit and wrote Scotland Yard’s

Cocaine Connection with two other journalists. In 2015, Jennings had a stroke and retired to Penrith, northwest England. Survivors include Sambrook, their two children, and a daughter from an earlier marriage.

In 1997, he spoke of his personal credo to aspiring investigative journalists: ‘‘When the pack of reporters go in one direction, go in the opposite direction . . . Stay away from the mob of quick-turnaround, news-bite reporters, and go away and dig until you think you are getting to some truths.’’

‘‘These scum have stolen the people’s sport, the cynical, thieving bastards.’’ Andrew Jennings in 2015, talking about his investigation into corruption within Fifa