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

by Heidi Blake

  Shortly after the visit to Doha by Sechin and the Russian 2018 bid team, Qatar and Russia announced that the Gulf state would join efforts to extract gas from the Yamal Peninsula. The Emir was anxiously preparing for a future when Qatar’s energy riches would run dry, and this deal allowed access to the untapped reserves in Siberia’s boundless gas fields – the biggest on the planet, running to trillions of cubic metres. It worked well for Russia too: extracting gas from this ferociously hostile stretch of the Arctic was an enormously expensive endeavour, so the world’s richest country was the perfect partner. Qatar had the cash; Russia had the limitless supply of gas. It was a perfect match.

  The joint venture was announced by Russia’s energy minister and his Qatari counterpart, Abdullah bin Hamad Al-Attiyah, the week after Sechin’s visit. Al-Attiyah was the same energy broker who oversaw the sale of liquid natural gas to Thailand for Makudi’s henchman Joe Sim at Bin Hammam’s behest in August. England caught wind of the alleged collusion deal between Qatar and Russia in the months after the Yamal venture was announced. Then, weeks before the World Cup ballot, the Emir visited the Kremlin to shake hands on the deal and the warning lights in the Moscow intelligence network started flashing red.

  Sheikh Hamad flew to Russia to see Vladimir Putin and the then president Dmitry Medvedev on 2 November. It was an official state visit with much fanfare and cordial public pronouncements on both sides. What the world didn’t know was that Bin Hammam had flown in to Moscow for his own meeting at the Kremlin days before, on 30 October.

  In an open letter to the Emir before the state visit, Medvedev wrote: ‘Russian–Qatari relations are showing steady growth and have become more dynamic and unquestionably more mutually advantageous of late.’ The Emir replied: ‘We are also interested in developing economic co-operation between Qatar and the Russian Federation. I have already had interesting meetings on this subject yesterday and today, including with the prime minister [Vladimir Putin], and with Gazprom CEO [Alexey] Miller.’

  When Bin Hammam had visited Moscow on his private jet days before, with Abo Rida loyally in tow, he had Gazprom on his mind. Qatar’s football boss had been invited by Russia’s Exco member and World Cup bid chairman, Mutko, to discuss ‘bilateral relations’ in sport with Putin. A briefing note prepared by his private staff before the visit advised him: ‘Most of the bid committee are former Gazprom officials. Gazprom is the largest extractor of natural gas in the world and the largest Russian company.’

  The England bid had only the scantest information about the Yamal deal in its database: nowhere near enough to get close to proving that it was linked to a vote-swapping pact between Qatar and Russia. But the claim from its well-placed sources inside Moscow that the two countries had traded blocs of votes was a fearsome prospect for England. Qatar was known to have solid backing across Asia and Africa. Russia was believed to have powerful allies in Franz Beckenbauer, Michel Platini, Michel D’Hooghe, Jacques Anouma and Sepp Blatter. If they teamed up, they would bulldoze every other bid.

  England’s bid leaders sat at their chequered gaming board with their heads in their hands. They were defeated. Anson was determined to press on through to the ballot, but Greenberg knew the game was up. Chelsea’s old spin doctor was already hunting for new jobs as the vote approached at the end of the year.

  Bin Hammam was cock-a-hoop. The campaign to bring the World Cup to Doha which had once seemed so hopeless was now powering towards victory. By autumn 2010, the Qatari had the four African voters in his pocket, his powerplay in Asia had worked like a charm, and his quest for a collusion deal had paid off handsomely. The deal with Spain alone would bring him a further four votes, and the alliance he had forged with Mutko promised still more. But Bin Hammam was not one to rest on his laurels, even with victory within reach. He was keen to reinforce the good work he had already done in Europe by reaching out again to continent’s most powerful figure – Michel Platini.

  Bin Hammam had been working hard to win Platini’s vote, and he had made the Frenchman promise to allow the official Qatar bid committee to visit him in Nyon when the two men had met during the World Cup in South Africa. In the months afterwards, Chirakal had diligently followed up on the agreement and made sure all the arrangements were fixed. All the leading lights of Qatar’s official bid committee flew to Nyon in October, two months before the World Cup ballot, to give the UEFA president a private presentation. Bin Hammam had originally been scheduled to lead the delegation, but he was called away on other engagements at the last moment, leaving Hassan Al-Thawadi at the helm.

  Qatar’s bid team gave a slick display at the formal meeting, but the real inroads were made the night before, when Platini dined privately at Geneva’s Tsé-Fung Chinese restaurant with Qatar’s crown prince, Sheikh Tamim bin Khalifa Al Thani. The heir to the throne had kept a low profile in Qatar’s World Cup campaign until now, allowing his little brother Sheikh Mohammed to revel in the limelight. But with the vote fast approaching, it was time for Qatar to roll out the heavyweights. After the private dinner with Platini, Sheikh Tamim had travelled to Zurich for a meeting with Blatter which had been arranged in a phone call between Bin Hammam and the FIFA president.

  A month later, with just ten days to go before the ballot, Sheikh Tamim returned to Europe for his most important meeting. The president of France, Nicolas Sarkozy, had invited him to dine in the classical splendour of the Elysée Palace in Paris. The other guest at the lunch was Sebastien Bazin, an executive representing the investment fund which owned the then struggling French football club, Paris Saint-Germain (PSG). It was Sarkozy’s favourite club and it was haemorrhaging an estimated €20 million a year. Its executives had been courting Qatar for months looking for investment to bail it out. A third guest had entered the grand corridors of the palace with some apprehension, not quite knowing quite why the president had summoned him. Michel Platini was ushered into the room and did a double-take. He had not expected to be reintroduced to the heir to the Qatar throne so soon after their recent dinner.

  The discussion that lunchtime remained secret until years after the World Cup vote when the magazine France Football reported that Sheikh Tamim had proposed that Qatar would buy PSG, and create a new TV sports channel in France to compete with Canal Plus, an outlet that Sarkozy despised. At the same time, Sarkozy used the gathering to put Platini under intense pressure to vote for Qatar.26 Indeed, the Gulf state’s sovereign investment fund would pay €50 million to buy PSG the year after the World Cup vote, and the Qatari-owned Al-Jazeera went on to create a French sports channel called beIN Sport and paid €150 million for the rights to screen French football until 2016.

  Platini had been won over and Bin Hammam could congratulate himself on laying the foundations for another major coup. His country’s once feeble World Cup bid had become an unstoppable force.

  Twelve

  Sex, Lies and Videotape

  A tiny secret camera had been carefully positioned on the smoked glass table of the hotel room, pointed directly at Michel Zen-Ruffinen. The former FIFA secretary general had continued to work in football as a lawyer since his well-publicised falling out with Sepp Blatter eight years earlier, and was now advising some lobbyists backing the American bid on the contest to host the World Cup. He had been promised a £230,000 consultancy fee and had been working his football contacts as hard as he could in return. Zen-Ruffinen had renewed his acquaintance with Mohamed bin Hammam’s fixer Amadou Diallo in Cairo the previous month and had been in phone contact with him for several weeks.

  A tall man in crisp blue shirt and dark tie, Zen-Ruffinen had greyed a little around the edges since his FIFA days. His brows furrowed as he delivered some bad news to the lobbyists in the privacy of his London hotel room on the morning of 13 October 2010. The hidden camera recorded every word: ‘There is an alliance Qatar [and] Spain, and there are seven votes committed to Qatar right now, but committed, committed which is probably impossible to turn . . . and that’s a real alliance. It’s bound, t
acked with a nice gift ribbon and that’s really problematic. This is the most problematic thing. I was informed about it last week. And this is not just a rumour, that’s a fact.’

  Five days later, a copy of the video containing Zen-Ruffinen’s comments was handed to a FIFA official at Heathrow airport. The official boarded the first flight to Zurich and delivered the package by hand to the desk of the ethics committee secretary in the headquarters of world football’s governing body. That day Jérôme Valcke, Zen-Ruffinen’s successor as secretary general, summoned the man with the handlebar moustache and cowboy boots into his office. FIFA’s new investigator, Chris Eaton, was to be tasked with looking into Zen-Ruffinen’s allegations about Qatar’s collusion with the Spain–Portugal bid. Bin Hammam’s covert deal with the Iberians had been unmasked. This was serious: there were just over six weeks left before the secret World Cup ballot and Eaton was threatening to dismantle a key pillar of his strategy.

  It was to be a bloody week for FIFA. The Sunday Times Insight team had gone undercover after receiving insider tip-offs about corruption in the World Cup bidding process, and Zen-Ruffinen was one of nine FIFA figures who they had secretly recorded during their investigation. Posing as lobbyists working in support of the US 2022 campaign, Jonathan Calvert and a former colleague had spent four months going round the bidding circuit finding out what it would take to win the ballot.

  The first instalment of their investigation had appeared in the newspaper that weekend under the banner headline ‘World Cup Votes for Sale’, and it had thrown the competition into chaos. FIFA had demanded the newspaper’s evidence and the Insight team was pleased that their findings were being taken seriously by world football’s governing body, so Calvert was happy to hand over the package of tapes to the official at the airport on 18 October 2010. It contained multiple allegations of bungs, bribes and requests for payment, implicating FIFA executive committee members in a seismic scandal that shook world football’s governing body to the core.

  Two executive committee members, Amos Adamu and Reynald Temarii, were instantly placed under provisional suspension and it now appeared highly unlikely that they would participate in the 2 December ballot. Adamu had been caught on camera agreeing to sell his vote for the 2018 tournament, and it was a disaster for Bin Hammam to lose the Nigerian Exco member whose vote he was counting on. Temarii had been recorded asking an undercover reporter seeking his vote for NZ$3 million (US$2.3 million) for a sports academy.

  A further four of the FIFA executive committee’s former officials were relieved from their football duties, pending the ethics committee’s investigation. Their colleagues on the Exco fumed at the insolence of the English media and were aghast that FIFA had pandered to them by taking such a brutal action against their friends. But there was no choice. FIFA had the film in their possession and the world’s media were bearing down like never before. Questions were being asked about whether the World Cup ballot should now be postponed. The boil needed to be lanced post-haste.

  It was bad enough for Bin Hammam to have lost a key voter in Adamu, and for the bidding process to be exposed to such scrutiny in the full glare of the world’s media, but that was not the worst of it. Eaton’s investigation into the collusion deal with Spain was the most awful consequence of the bomb The Sunday Times had dropped. This sort of meddling was exactly what Bin Hammam had feared when Blatter announced the ethics committee was going to be overseeing the bidding process. Bin Hammam had previously asked his lawyers whether there was any way to challenge the unnecessary interference of FIFA’s sleepy ethics men, but he had been told there was nothing he could do to stand in their way. Eaton’s intervention was the last straw. This was the first time that FIFA had enlisted a proactive sleuth to police the bids. Could they really do this? There certainly wasn’t anything in the statutes about using the services of an investigator to carry out the work of the ethics committee. Where would Eaton’s investigation lead? What else might he find out?

  For FIFA’s new investigator, this was the first big opportunity to cut his teeth on some serious work. Eaton instantly recognised the developing scandal as a great chance to build his empire. ‘This is the time for me to push a good security structure for FIFA,’ he said in an email to a friend. ‘My attitude is that we have one big shot here to get it right operationally and politically,’ he wrote later to another associate. ‘This combination of incidents will force FIFA to create an internal capability they never really thought they would need. So we will take that positive out of it if nothing else.’

  Valcke wanted Eaton to report directly to him on the collusion allegations, independently of the ethics committee which already had its hands full dealing with the other evidence contained in the package the newspaper had supplied. Football’s favourite spin doctor Peter Hargitay was also on the case, emailing Valcke with a story from the Daily Telegraph, once the news of the investigation had been officially announced that evening. ‘In case there are further similar pieces, I send them to you.’ Hargitay kindly offered to his friend ‘cher Jérôme’.

  Eaton had his work cut out for him with Qatar – the official bid committee was not going to accept his interference without a fight. Immediately after receiving a dossier of the allegations in the secret tapes from The Sunday Times, Hassan Al-Thawadi had written a furious letter to FIFA demanding that the ethics committee exonerate his bid. The letter from the Qatar bid chief executive was indignant. ‘We are writing to you to inform you of allegations presented to us by The Sunday Times,’ he wrote. ‘The Insight Editor, requested our comments on 14 October 2010, as he is legally obliged to do so. The accusations he presented are completely unfounded, including allegations of collusion and bribery, all of which are completely false.’

  Al-Thawadi was particularly stung that the newspaper had quoted FIFA’s rules at Qatar in its letter. He continued: ‘The article also makes reference to the Bid registration rules. Based on FIFA’s instructions, we understand that this document, along with all bid documents, is strictly confidential. We question how The Sunday Times was able to obtain a copy of it. We are outraged. As we’re sure you can appreciate, these allegations not only damage our bid to host the 2022 World Cup, but they also disparage the honor of the State of Qatar. The bid has always adhered to the highest ethical standards, in line with the State of Qatar’s policies. We are conducting our own investigation into these matters, and strongly urge the FIFA Ethics Committee to also look into them.’

  On the same day, Al-Thawadi sent a separate message to Bin Hammam’s personal email account attaching a copy of FIFA’s bidding rules on collusion and gifts to football officials. His email did not say why he felt the need to refresh his countryman’s memory about such illicit practices when Bin Hammam, a former member of the ethics committee, already knew they were strictly prohibited.

  Eaton got down to business straight away, firing off identical letters to the Qatar and Iberian bids. He addressed the first letter to Ali Al-Thawadi, the Qatar bid’s deputy chief executive: ‘Greetings to you,’ he wrote. ‘My name is Chris Eaton and I am the Security Adviser to FIFA. Secretary General Valcke has directed me to investigate the recent media reports of collusion between your Committee and the bidding Committees of Portugal/Spain. My purpose in writing to you is firstly to introduce both myself and my role in investigating this media report, and secondly to ask you whether you and your Committee will cooperate with my investigation. Should you agree to cooperate with the investigation, and as a first step, can you advise as soon as possible of the name and contact details of the person in your Committee who will be my point of contact and with whom I will initiate my inquiries.’

  A couple of hours later he sent both bids a further message to say: ‘To be clear my investigation under the direction of SG Valcke, is independent of and additional to the ongoing investigation of the FIFA Ethics Committee.’ The Iberian bid responded immediately offering full cooperation, but Doha remained silent.

  Eaton had been with FIF
A for just six months but he realised he would have to tip-toe gingerly through a minefield of internal political agendas – especially if he was to use the investigation to cement his position in the organisation. One of his security team, an Englishman named Terry Steans, wrote to warn him that any investigation into Qatar was sensitive because Bin Hammam was said to have funded Sepp Blatter’s election campaigns. ‘It means you treading carefully if Hammam is that close to the President,’ wrote Steans, an outwardly gentle teddy-bear of a man with a sharp grasp of football politics who often took the role of Eaton’s consiglieri. ‘I appreciate this heads up mate,’ Eaton responded. ‘I am pretty well aware of how close Blatter is to Bin Hammam. I’ll take it into account in my approach, but that’s all.’ Eaton was already of the view that Qatar was colluding with Spain, but he knew it would be hard to prove. ‘From what I can see there is nothing solid yet on the collusion, but on the balance of probabilities, it happened,’ he wrote to Steans. ‘I am working from that premise.’

  The package containing the evidence from The Sunday Times had been copied and distributed to Eaton and his team. In his small office in FIFA headquarters, Eaton placed a disc into his computer, swung his boots up on the table and sat back to watch the footage. There was hours of it. The reporters had posed as lobbyists representing a consortium supporting the American bid and they had initially met a series of former FIFA officials who were offering their services as consultants advising on how to secure votes. Their tapes were to be quite an education about the darker side of FIFA for its new security advisor.

  The scene in the first tape was a table elegantly set with an array of glasses. Into shot came a bald man, dark-eyed in his late thirties, wearing an open-necked blue shirt and black jacket. The accompanying notes from the newspaper indicated that this was Michel Bacchini, who had been employed as FIFA’s director of competitions for eight years and was now running his own football consultancy. The footage had been filmed in August at a Michelin-starred restaurant on the banks of Lake Zurich, a five-minute drive down the hill from Bacchini’s home. The athletic Swiss consultant had represented Indonesia’s short-lived bid for 2022 and had clearly been doing his homework. He knew an awful lot about the bidding process, which he was confidently imparting to his two lunch companions.