The Ugly Game: The Qatari Plot to Buy the World Cup

by Heidi Blake

  The FIFA presidency was the main prize, but first both men needed to survive the next AFC election, which would be a few weeks after the World Cup vote, in January 2011. This was when Chung’s position as Asia’s FIFA vice-president would be up for grabs, as would Bin Hammam’s presidency of the Asian confederation. Bin Hammam swore he would do all he could in the run-up to the vote to help Chung get re-elected. In so doing, he intended to establish a vital claim on Chung’s loyalty that would pave the way for a World Cup vote-swapping pact which would sweep Qatar to victory in the ballot the month before.

  Bin Hammam gave Chung the use of his trusted electoral fixer, Manilal Fernando, whose gerrymandering had helped him win successive elections to his own West Asian Exco seat and scuppered the attempted coup the previous year. The Sri Lankan set to work lobbying voters to back Chung for FIFA vice-president and Bin Hammam for AFC president. He was also seeking a seat on FIFA’s Exco for himself. ‘I have just returned from Dubai, where I had a meeting with my group,’ the fixer would write in an email to Chung later that year. ‘All these countries agreed to support Mr Bin Hammam for president, you for FIFA vice-president and myself for FIFA Exco member. Already Sri Lanka, India, Bhutan, Nepal and Tajikistan have signed your nomination. In addition Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Maldives, Usbekistan [sic] and Pakistan will send your nominations directly to the AFC to Mr Bin Hammam. Mr Bin Hammam is campaigning very hard for you . . . You are in a strong position with Mr Hammam, myself and Warawi [Makudi] all supporting you . . . Like I worked for Hammam last time I will work for him and you this time, do not worry we are winning.’

  The Sri Lankan sought large rewards for the countries whose support he locked down.15 Like Amadou Diallo, he had an official role with the Goal Programme, the FIFA fund for football development in poor countries chaired by Bin Hammam. He sent the Qatari a list of countries in his group which were to be given payments under the programme of $400,000 each. They were Pakistan, Afghanistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Sri Lanka. Fernando wanted Bin Hammam to use his position to obtain approval for the payments from the Goal Bureau. He was also keen that another source of football development money was generously lavished on key voters, writing to Bin Hammam in the summer to recommend loosening the purse strings of the AFC’s own Aid 27 budget. ‘Until elections are over we must see that all funds due from Aid [27] to countries are paid without making it difficult for them with too many questions asked,’ he suggested.

  Bin Hammam continued to shower Asian football bosses with direct payments from the network of slush funds operated by Kemco. Asatulloev Zarifjon, president of the Tajikistan football federation, received $50,000 in June 2010. The next month, Fernando’s ally, Nidal Hadid of the Jordan FA, received $50,000 into his personal bank account from the account of Bin Hammam’s daughter, Aisha. Another loyal ally of Fernando was handsomely rewarded for supporting Bin Hammam. Ganesh Thapa, president of the Nepalese FA, was paid a total of £115,000 from two separate Kemco accounts in the spring and summer of 2010.16

  Chung and Bin Hammam kept talking behind the scenes after their meeting in Seoul and by the time of the South African World Cup, the Qatari was ready to bring Ogura into the circle of trust. It fell to Chung to set up a meeting in Johannesburg. The South Korean emailed Ogura, Bin Hammam and Makudi, inviting them to a summit over a lavish meal at the Michelangelo Hotel. Bin Hammam would later bill the AFC $3,482 for a ‘dinner with Exco members’.

  It ought to have been a tense gathering – with the most senior officials of three rival bidding countries in one room representing interests which, on the face of it, were diametrically opposed. But Bin Hammam’s pacific approach would soon relieve the tension. His proposal was simple: he was just asking the men around the table to remember their loyalty to Mother Asia when they went to the ballot box in December. He was a Qatari, he told them, so he was duty-bound to vote for Qatar, and he understood that they felt the same about their own countries. They were all patriots, and rightly so, but the Asian football family must stick together. He was simply asking Chung and Ogura to promise that they would transfer their votes to another Asian bid if their home countries failed to survive the early voting rounds of the World Cup ballot that December, as he would also do if Qatar dropped out.

  Bin Hammam was secretly confident that he had enough votes in his pocket for his country to storm through the early rounds. His covert campaign had already stacked the deck heavily in Qatar’s favour, but to reach an absolute majority in the final stages he needed to know that Chung and Ogura would ultimately support Qatar once their own bids had been eliminated. Even if Ogura backed South Korea initially once Japan crashed out, the pact would compel him to transfer his vote to the only Asian contender left standing – Qatar – in the end. It was a neat solution to a knotty problem and, encouragingly, his fellow Asian voters seemed amenable.

  After the dinner, Bin Hammam continued his courting of Chung. The South Korean shared Bin Hammam’s private jet between World Cup matches, and was invited to enjoy VIP hospitality alongside the Qatari crown prince, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, at a game in Cape Town. By the end of the tournament, the pair were close friends. On 2 July, Chung emailed Bin Hammam a friendly message: ‘There will be the quarter-final between Uruguay and Ghana in Soccer City today. I would like to go with you and watch the game together. On the way, we can talk about various topics of mutual interest.’

  Days later, the Qatari was delighted to receive another invitation from Chung to an ‘evening of music’ at the Johannesburg Country Club hosted by Dr Lee Hong-Koo, the former prime minister of Korea, on 5 July. The invitation promised: ‘The event will feature various entertainers including world-renowned soprano Ms Sumi Jo. I sincerely hope that you can attend this event as it would give us the opportunity to shift gears into a more relaxing mode to celebrate together the first World Cup in Africa.’ As he and his new ally strolled the lawns by the lake in the dusky evening light, Bin Hammam could congratulate himself in a masterful feat of diplomacy. In just a year, he had gone from being Chung’s worst enemy to his close friend.

  Six days later, on 11 July, the World Cup came to its spectacular end. Be, Chirakal and Meshadi huddled in the stands at Soccer City, braced against the cold as darkness descended and the floodlights were dimmed. A squadron of Gripens from the South African Airforce roared over the stadium and hundreds of dancers and musicians exploded onto the field to form the shape of a giant vuvuzela. Be snapped photographs of the firework display that marked the closing ceremony, and the three were on their feet with the rest of the crowd as South Africa’s Ladysmith Black Mambazo belted out their famous ‘Weather Song’.

  Then came the nail-biting final, in which Spain defeated the Netherlands 1-0 with a goal from Andrés Iniesta four minutes from the end of extra time, lifting the trophy in a blaze of golden confetti. It was a bitterly cold night, and Chirakal wore a knitted hat and warmed his hands in his pockets, while Meshadi pulled his thick wool coat about him and threw his grey scarf over his shoulder. Be sat wedged between her two friends in her blue jumper and black coat, her face lighting up with excitement for all that she felt she was freezing. ‘It was so cold, we almost fell asleep during the game (hypothermia) . . . ah, that would be totally embarassing,’ she wrote to friends. And now it was all over. The first African World Cup had been a sensation.

  Now Bin Hammam had opened up to his fellow voters in Asia about his loyalty to Qatar, he no longer felt the need to maintain the public pretence that he was impartial as the president of the AFC. After he returned from Johannesburg, it was not long before his jet was firing up again to carry him to Singapore for the SoccerEx football convention. There, for the first time, he publicly declared his support for his country – with a nod to the deal he offered his fellow Asian voters. ‘I have one vote . . . and frankly speaking I will vote for Qatar, but if Qatar is not in the running I will vote for another Asian country,’ he told journalists. There was not a snowball’s chance in hell
that Qatar would not be in the running if he had anything to do with it, but this was the premise of the pact he had proposed. So successfully had Bin Hammam kept his covert campaign for his country’s bid under wraps, that the announcement caused quite a stir. Reuters reported that ‘Qatar’s bid to host the 2022 World Cup received a huge boost on Wednesday when Asian Football Confederation President Mohamed Bin Hammam threw his weight behind his country’s campaign.’ Hassan Al-Thawadi thanked him warmly for so generously lending his backing.

  When Asia’s four Exco members were together again in Kuala Lumpur in August for a meeting of the AFC’s own ruling committee, the foundations of their vote-swapping pact were recorded in the formal minutes. ‘We have four Asian nations bidding and three are represented in the FIFA executive committee,’ Bin Hammam told the assembled officials. ‘I, Dr Chung, Mr Ogura will be supporting our respective nations, Qatar, Korea Republic and Japan. But we should promise each other that if any of our bid loses, then the support will be switched to the other bidders not only by voting but also by campaigning for each other. I think this is the one thing we owe to our continent.’

  This was not something to be discussed too publicly, because the Asian voters were entering a grey area of the rules. FIFA banned member associations and bid committees from striking ‘any kind of agreement with any other member association or bid committee as regards to the behaviour during the bidding process [which] may influence the bidding process’. But private agreements between the Exco members of bidding countries were impossible to police and in effect fell outside the regulations. That was the beauty of a secret ballot – no one need ever know.

  The ploy worked – both Chung and Ogura pledged their loyalty to their fellow Asian bids if their own countries dropped out. Presenting the Japanese bid to the Asian Football Confederation the same month, Ogura said: ‘The AFC President has made it clear that he will support Qatar. While I will surely vote for Japan, Dr Chung must be on his own country’s side. . . but no matter what, what is most important for the Asian football family is seeing the World Cup back on Asian soil.’

  Bin Hammam had the final votes of his two Asian rivals in the bag. Added to his own and that of his ally Makudi, all four of the continent’s votes would now belong to Qatar in the final rounds that really mattered. The Thai voter had demonstrated extraordinary loyalty to Bin Hammam and he had pledged his unstinting support to Qatar 2022. There was also the hope that Makudi would allow his Qatari friend to trade his 2018 vote too as he cast around for an alliance with one of the European countries in the running for the earlier tournament. Makudi was a true friend indeed, and it was about time that Bin Hammam gave something back to the man from Bangkok. That was the next item on the agenda.

  Nine

  Who Is Sim Hong Chye?

  The walls of the attic hideout were plastered floor-to-ceiling with scraps of paper scrawled with a muddle of names, dates and figures in multi-coloured felt-tip pen. The journalists joked that the room they had come to call ‘the bunker’ looked as if it had been inhabited by a crazed prisoner who had covered his cell in demented scribble over years in solitary confinement. It was 2am. The pubs had long since turned out and the town outside was still. Gentle rain fizzled at the windows. The servers hummed. Otherwise, all was silent as Calvert and Blake hunched over their computer screens, scanning through document after document, panning for gold. The bins were brimming over with discarded ready-meal packets and their desks were cluttered with jumbled papers, coffee mugs and crumpled Red Bull cans. On the table nearby were the abandoned cartons of the Indian takeaway they had devoured a few hours earlier. Summer had come early, and in the rising heat their increasingly foetid environment brought back memories of university, pulling all-nighters in the offices of their student newspapers.

  The journalists had been hard at work mining the cache of documents they were now calling ‘The FIFA Files’ for two months. In that time, they had built up an astonishing picture of Bin Hammam’s multi-million-dollar campaign of bribery, logging details of each of the payments he made to officials across Africa and Asia from his Kemco slush-funds and the bundles of cash he handed out to visitors on his junkets. They had goggled at the size of the two bungs he had paid directly to the shameless shake-down merchant Jack Warner, Trinidad’s voter on the executive committee, in the run-up to the World Cup ballot. The Qatari’s attempts to woo Franz Beckenbauer and Reynald Temarii away from voting for Australia were a source of fascination, as was the masterful powerplay he had pulled off to win the loyalty of Chung Mong-joon. Reading through the documents, the journalists were increasingly amazed that Bin Hammam’s role in Qatar’s World Cup victory had been kept so successfully out of the public eye. How had he managed to maintain the pretence of neutrality until announcing his intention to vote for Qatar at SoccerEx in July 2010, when he had really been campaigning vigorously for the country for two years by that point?

  When Calvert and Blake had first set up camp in this attic, they had wondered how far all this work would really get them. Allegations of corruption had swirled around Qatar’s World Cup bid for years, but no one had ever been able to make anything stick. At the beginning, they had not been sure they were going to find any evidence strong enough to really prove that the bidding process had been corrupted. Two months on, they had no such concerns. The scribblings all over the walls, coupled with the monster spreadsheets they were compiling, documented their haul of damning facts. But after two months of reading Bin Hammam’s correspondence, they had also come to feel a strange sense of familiarity with this distant Qatari billionaire and his loyal aides.

  His activities were unquestionably corrupt, but it was hard not to warm to Bin Hammam for his graciousness, dignity and – ironically – his generosity. He fed the dozens of men who turned up at his house every night. He paid for the medical bills of ailing football officials in foreign lands, or he bankrolled their children’s education. And the aides he kept close adored him. Najeeb Chirakal was a man they couldn’t fail to feel fond of when they read the unstinting patience and courtesy with which he conducted his master’s affairs, and the gossipy chatter of the messages between the trusted trio of women at the AFC often had the journalists in fits of giggles. It was a strange thing, to inhabit a man’s world like this. They had come to imagine they really knew the characters whose activities they were unravelling.

  The journalists were feeling a lot of pressure. Their newsdesk back in London had been as patient as they could ever have expected in allowing them to disappear for months like this, but their editor had told them in no uncertain terms that their story must be ready by the start of the 2014 World Cup in Brazil that summer. That meant they had until 1 June to finish trawling the millions of documents, pull all their voluminous evidence together and distil it, somehow, into a succinct series of coherent articles fit for print. It was early May, so they had less than a month to finish the job. At the start of the project, they had allowed themselves breaks at the weekend to catch the train back to London and snatch a day or two with their families and friends, but that sort of time off was a luxury they could no longer afford. Weekends had been cancelled and now work continued far past midnight each evening. They had each worn every item of clothing they had brought with them dozens of times, and they were both in need of a haircut. But then hiding in an attic for several months was never going to be glamorous.

  The source had become a trusted friend by this stage in the investigation, and the mutual wariness that had persisted for the first few weeks had dissipated. He was often abroad but when he was in the UK he popped in from time to time, kindly bringing rations of fruit, bags of crisps or sushi boxes, and had generously installed a mini-fridge to keep their energy drinks cool when summer arrived early. He was somewhat baffled by the journalists’ mania for their story – their willingness to put their entire lives on hold and devote themselves so single-mindedly to this peculiar task. He observed the two increasingly bedraggled characters in the attic,
their impenetrable in-jokes, strange Fleet Street slang and occasional squabbling, with perplexed amusement. But he’d grown oddly fond of them, and the feeling was mutual. Now that the reporters had been separated from everyone they knew except each other for two months, the source was always a welcome sight when he popped in to remind them that an outside world existed beyond those four walls. Otherwise, the only people they saw were the receptionists in their nearby hotel when they slipped out at 7am or came back pink-eyed and woozy from hours fixed to their computers in the early hours of the morning.

  Calvert and Blake had devised a system to sift through their unconquerable mound of material as efficiently as they possibly could, without overlapping. They kept a growing spreadsheet of keywords – the names of major players, companies, places or organisations – and divided them up each morning to make sure there was no crossover in the searches they ran across the vast database that day. Tonight, Calvert was wading through the hundreds of results thrown up by his searches for the lobbyists associated with the German voter Franz Beckenbauer – Fedor Radmann and Andreas Abold. They made fascinating reading, and he had barely looked up from his screen since discarding his empty carton of Chicken Korai and scoffing the last scraps of naan bread several hours before. Meanwhile, Blake was burrowing into an intriguing seam of documents which seemed to relate to some sort of gas deal involving Bin Hammam and a man called Sim Hong Chye. And suddenly, it was all beginning to fall into place.

  ‘Oh my God, Jonathan,’ she exclaimed. ‘You have to come and look at this!’ There was silence. When Calvert was deep in concentration, it often took several attempts to rouse him, and Blake was not famed for her patience. ‘Jonathan? Jonathan! Look at this!’

  ‘Hmm?’ he said dreamily, without looking up. Blake sprang out of her chair, exasperated, and crossed the room. He lifted his eyes from the screen and met her gaze blearily. ‘What’s up?’