PSG president on £2.8m bribery charges

ONE of the most powerful men in football, the Qatari president of Paris Saint-Germain, has been charged by a French judge with corruption. Nasser Al-Khelaifi is accused of paying millions in bribes to host the 2017 and 2019 athletics World Championships. Al-Khelaifi, who is also the boss of Qatari TV channel BeIN Sports and was appointed only three months ago to UEFA’s executive committee, is alleged to have made two payments totalling £2.8m to a company run by Papa Massata Diack. Diack is the son of former IAAF president Lamine Diack and both are facing trial in France on corruption charges. Qatar, who will also host the next World Cup, secured the rights to stage this year’s athletics World Championships and has now become the focus of French prosecutors. UEFA appointed Al-Khelaifi despite concerns that PSG had breached Financial Fair Play rules and the fact that he was also embroiled in a criminal investigation in Switzerland over the procurement of World Cup TV rights. UEFA said last night they were ‘monitoring the situation’. London won the rights to host the 2017 athletics World Championships but former chairman Ed Warner told a parliamentary committee in 2016 that a senior IAAF official had warned them of possible bribes being offered by the Qataris. Before that, Warner spoke in an interview with the BBC of ‘brown envelopes’ allegedly being offered. This followed a report in The Guardian in 2014 which detailed an email sent by Papa Massata Diack which apparently asked Qatar for £3.5m ahead of the 2017 bid. The two payments under scrutiny were allegedly made by Oryx Qatar Sports Investment, a company jointly owned by Al-Khelaifi and his brother Khalid. A lawyer representing Al-Khelaifi said: ‘Nasser Al-Khelaifi was neither a shareholder, nor a director of Oryx in 2011. ‘He did not intervene either directly or indirectly in the candidature of Doha.’