Is net closing at last on this slippery despot?
HAvIng l ed England’s failed 2018 World Cup bid, former Football Association chairman Lord Triesman said Fifa ‘ behaves l i ke a Mafia family … It has decades-long traditions of bribes, bungs and corruption.’
He said Don Corleone – the fictional family head in the Mafia franchise The godfather – ‘would approve’ its methods. Few get close enough to make such a judgment.
Fifa is run by a 24- strong executive committee, in a manner which has been described as ‘byzantine and impenetrable’. At its head sits the most powerful man in global sport, the 79-year- old Swiss-born Joseph ‘Sepp’ Blatter.
Having held the position of Fifa president since 1998, he has been famously scandal-proof. Certainly he was not among those seven Fifa officials who were yesterday led in handcuffs from a five- star hotel before they could tuck into their expense-account breakfasts.
They had been gathered for tomorrow’s annual meeting, at which it had been expected Mr Blatter would be re-elected to his post for a fifth term. He had previously said he would not stand again but changed his mind.
It is likely that he will still put himself forward as president despite yesterday’s arrests; Mr Blatter also seems to be impervious to any kind of shame or personal responsibility. In the past, he has even blamed Fifa’s problems on the ‘evils’ of the investigative media. There’s certainly no doubt the media have battled nobly to hold Fifa to account.
Blatter is cautious though. The Mail has been told that he neither sends nor receives emails and does not own a mobile phone. For several years, he has also been strangely absent from the United States, a country in which Fifa has been active in encouraging the professional game. Mr Blatter has denied that this absence had anything to do with possible criminal investigations.
However, the net was beginning to tighten as the US Attorney general last night refused to rule out charges being laid against Blatter. Swiss police ordered him and all other Fifa officials not to leave the country as investigations continue.
Blatter is expected to be interviewed by Swiss authorities ‘ within days’, according to sources in Zurich.
Regardless of these developments, there is no reason why he would voluntarily step down from such a lofty and glamorous throne.
He is arguably more powerful than the leaders of many countries. Fifa has 209 national associations, compared with the Un’s 193 member states; thanks to the commercial popularity of the game he has turned into a personal fiefdom, Mr Blatter can bestow enormous gifts upon both sovereign states and multinational companies, who want their names associated with the game’s superstars.
Mr Blatter can name his price. Fifa’s latest declared accounts reflect this.
They show revenue between 2011 and 2014 of £3.73billion, some 43 per cent of which came from TV broadcast deals. This has left it with cash reserves of some £977million. How much else went through undeclared back channels, into Fifa officials’ pockets remains to be seen.
The last World Cup, in Brazil in 2014, cost the host nation £2.6billion but saw Fifa make a £1.3billion profit. The cost of Qatar 2022 is estimated to be £4billion.
It is a far cry from Fifa’s inception 111 years ago in Paris, when the representatives of just seven football associations were present.
The first World Cup took place in 1930. By then the HQ had moved to the footballing hotbed of Zurich, where money talks but only in hushed whispers and is very hard to trace.
Blatter, a business graduate, joined Fifa 40 years ago and worked his way up to president. His salary is a secret although latest Fifa accounts state £25.9million was paid to ‘key management personnel’ in 2014. It has been estimated Mr Blatter might have received as much as £3.9million of this.
Growing allegations of systemic bribery and corruption during his watch came to a pitch with the 2010 twin bidding processes for the 2018 and 2022 World Cups.
The BBC’s Panorama alleged that, for 20 years, FIFA had awarded the rights to commercially exploit the World Cup to just one company – Swiss firm ISL. The company, which went bust in 2001, then sold the rights to multinational giants such as Adidas and Coca Cola and the world television networks. How did ISL corner this deal? Internal documents suggested it had paid secret bribes totalling £65million to a handful of Fifa officials. This was not a crime in Switzerland at the time, apparently.
OTHer Fifa officials were i nvolved i n World Cup ticket-touting on a huge scale. Blatter’s regime did nothing. reservations about Fifa’s probity overshadowed that year’s double voting rounds. The location of the 2018 and 2022 World Cups would be decided by the 24-strong executive committee. But two of its members had to stand down before the process started when a newspaper allegedly recorded them offering to sell their votes. Further accusations of financial corruption and vote trading began almost as soon as the results were announced.
Qatar, which has no football history, narrowly beat the US for 2022. The tiny country of 1.6million people boasts a poor human rights record, links to Islamic extremists and a mean daily temperature in the northern hemisphere’s summer – when the World Cup has always taken place – of more than 40C.
A Fifa whistleblower alleged the Qataris had paid £978,000 to secure the votes of two Fifa executive committee members from Africa. This was denied by the Qataris.
It was also alleged that the russians had paid huge kickbacks to Fifa voters to gain their right to stage the 2018 World Cup.
Lord Triesman later claimed Jack Warner, Fifa’s vice president, and three other Fifa officials had demanded large sums of money in return for backing england’s unsuccessful bid. One had even asked for a knighthood. Fifa initially ignored these damaging allegations. Instead, it focused on internal politics and a threat to the Blatter hegemony.
In March 2011, Warner was suspended for alleged financial irregularities, along with the Qatari-born Asian Football Federation president Mohamed Bin Hammam, another Fifa committee member.
Bin Hammam, who had a controversial key role in financially ‘supporting’ Qatar’s successful 2022 bid, was standing for the Fifa presidency against Blatter. It was said that Bin Hammam, a construction magnate, had backed Blatter’s 1998 election with bribes to African delegates. Now he wanted to be the boss.
ReVeLATIONS that Bin Hammam had given Fifa delegates envelopes containing upwards of £26,000 in cash to a total of £652,000, to secure their vote saw him handed a Fifa life ban. Blatter was reelected as president unopposed.
Warner took revenge by leaking an email in which the Fifa general secretary, Jerome Valcke, had written that Qatar had ‘bought the World Cup’. Mr Warner resigned and the organisation immediately stopped its investigation into his alleged wrongdoing. How convenient for all. It stank to high heaven.
But Fifa had to appear to be taking the ‘tsunami’ of allegations seriously. In 2012 it appointed former US attorney Michael J Garcia as ‘chief ethics investigator’ to look at alleged corruption in the World Cup 2018 and 2022 voting processes.
He delivered his 450-page report last November. Fifa flatly refused to publish it. Instead, a 42-page ‘summary’ of the report was made available by Fifa. It suggested Mr Garcia had f ound that any rule violations in the bidding process were ‘of very limited scope.’
Outraged at the misrepresentation of his findings, Mr Garcia resigned, saying his report had uncovered ‘serious and wide-ranging issues’ in the bidding and selection process for the two World Cups.
He suggested that Fifa was incapable of reforming from within and that it suffered from a lack of leadership to become more transparent and ethical.
Fifa was in full damage limitation mode yesterday, but also defiant. It was ‘ fully co- operating as the injured party’. On its website it stated: ‘Fifa protects the integrity of football and is fighting corruption in football.’
But there would be no re-run of the World Cup bidding processes for the 2018 and 2022 tournaments. The presidential election would also go ahead on Friday as planned. Thanks to the favours he has accrued in Asia and Africa there is a real chance that Blatter will be returned to his throne for a fifth term. Nobody should be surprised. In the land that invented the cuckoo clock, it’s business as usual for the ‘dark prince’ who runs the ‘people’s game’.