Why trawling for truth in bungs scandal is so hard
Beneficiaries use secretive banks to hide their loot
WHEN English football’s first bungs inquiry reported in 1995 and the game was to be cleaned up for good, one tale especially caught the eye. The late Ronnie Fenton, Brian Clough’s assistant at Nottingham Forest, had driven to Hull to collect £45,000 in cash which had arrived on an Icelandic fishing trawler. The allegation, reported by the commission of inquiry, was that it was a cut of the transfer fee paid for Toddy Orlygsson, the Icelandic midfielder.
In retrospect, it almost seems quaint and romantic in the light of the techniques of the 21st century. Backhanders on transfers always needed ways to avoid wire transfers which might be picked up by tax officials or accountants. In the Eighties, that meant brown envelopes full of cash handed over at service stations — or fishing ports.
Yet in the 21st century, the model has been honed into something much more sophisticated. These days, many key figures in the game would expect to have a bank account offshore in the regime with the most-opaque regulations, such as the Cayman Islands. Monaco is less popular now because of pressure from the European Union to be more transparent.
It means that a manager, who is working with an representative, can agitate his chief executive to buy a player his own agent also represents. To secure the transfer, the agent might persuade the chief executive that the club will need to pay him, the agent, a £2million fee, as only he can convince the player to join that club.
The fee would be described as payment for facilitating the move. But in reality, young footballers often listen more closely to their agent for advice than their parents or partners — and so clubs know having the agent onside is key to securing a deal.
The agent in question might then reward the manager but no longer by means of a brown envelope. The £2m fee would be passed into the representative’s company account, which might well be based in the Cayman Islands.
The manager’s wife or son might be the beneficiary of a trust fund in the Cayman Islands, which is set up in such a way as to make it impossible to identify the true beneficiaries.