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

by Heidi Blake

  Bacchini’s advice to the fake American lobbyists was that votes would come with strings attached and that often meant paying money, alas. The way to win votes was to encourage big corporations to offer FIFA executive committee members business deals that would generate income for them. This had to be done at arm’s length. He advised his lunch companions that the voters would have ‘somebody doing their job for them’ who would cut a side deal on their behalf. ‘And when it comes to the worst, he doesn’t know anything, you know, you can’t trace anything because it’s somewhere in an account which is not him, in the beginning,’ he said. Warming to his theme, he said he knew ‘how to get to’ one member of the committee who he alleged had become wealthy as a result of his dealings with the successful German bid for the 2006 World Cup. That man’s vote would cost ‘easily’ $1 million. But such approaches would come at a price. ‘I can reach out easily to several [FIFA Exco] members myself. But you have to consider I take a big risk and if I take a big risk, this would be significantly more expensive. I need to cover my risk,’ he said.

  In preparation for the lunch, Bacchini had been thinking about how to make sure an Exco member could be made to honour a pledge of support. He had learnt much from his bitter experience working for the Moroccan bid as a consultant in the run-up to the May 2004 ballot for the 2010 World Cup, eventually won by South Africa. He claimed his Moroccan colleagues had paid Jack Warner upfront for his vote, but the Trinidadian executive committee member had double-crossed them. ‘They were paying him and at the end when they were voting here in Zurich, you know, he was making a big scene, he was running out of the hotel complaining that somebody was cheating. He was the guy who cheated, he was making a big scenario out of it. I know a hundred hundred per cent that he was voting for the South Africans and pretended to vote for the Moroccans. . . . I always say you never have to pay any money upfront.’ His proposed solution was to place the money in an escrow, from which it would be released only once the American bid had been successful.

  Even to a seasoned investigator such as Eaton, the frank discussion of such illicit practices must have been surprising. And there was worse to come. The main threat to the American bid, Bacchini contended, came from Bin Hammam and Qatar, ‘because of the money’. ‘I know that Bin Hammam is working on 2022 – for Qatar,’ he said. As the cameras rolled, Bacchini set out his understanding of where Qatar’s bid was. He had been making phone calls and was confident that Bin Hammam had the support of the Africans – Jacques Anouma, Amos Adamu and Issa Hayatou. He was unsure about Hany Abo Rida, because he was unfamiliar with this newcomer to the executive committee. Worawi Makudi was a certain voter for Qatar. ‘He’s a Bin Hammam guy, you have to know he’s Bin Hammam,’ said Bacchini. ‘He is in this position because of him, he backs him and so on. He would only change his opinion if the top guy comes, which is only one guy, the [FIFA] president, or he gets a really good deal.’

  Bacchini believed Bin Hammam was also wooing Chung Mong-joon. He continued: ‘And I know Bin Hammam is clever enough, he knows that a guy like Chung, he’s not giving his vote for the first vote or the second-round votes, because if Korea stays in, he would always vote for Korea. Once it’s out, then we need to get his vote. So that’s where you win.’ Chung was not someone whose vote could be bought because ‘he is just straight’, but the way to appeal to him was with ‘power, politics’. Bacchini was absolutely sure the three South American voters were backing Spain for 2018 – which apparently confirmed at least half of the story about the collusion deal with the Qatar. There was a possible lead for Eaton.

  Reynald Temarii was almost certainly voting for Australia, and Bacchini thought Qatar would struggle with the European voters. ‘The Europeans don’t want to have Bin Hammam having the World Cup in Qatar. But he tries,’ he said. Bin Hammam was a dangerous foe. Bacchini warned his two new friends that the Americans would have to have deep pockets ‘because the Qataris are, hey I mean Qataris, they don’t care, they pay you ten million’.

  Eaton could see that Bacchini had no direct evidence that Bin Hammam was offering payments to the voters, but he was a seasoned insider in world football and his comments were worth bearing in mind. It was time to flick on to the next recording. A bulky figure with a voluminous grey jacket and mottled skin filled the screen, almost blotting out what appeared to be the interior of a hotel bar behind him. It was Ismail Bhamjee, who had been a FIFA executive committee member for eight years before he was forced to resign over a ticketing scandal four years earlier. Bhamjee was popular and well known in world football, and he remained an honorary member of CAF.

  Aged 66, Bhamjee was a grandee who had been to every World Cup since 1966. But experience had clearly not brought him discretion. Was it really necessary for him to confide in the two lobbyists he was meeting for the first time that FIFA had paid his $150,000 a year salary, plus expenses, into a London bank account so that he could dodge tax in his home country, Botswana? It was to get worse. Bhamjee was apparently sipping only water, not alcohol, but he was becoming increasingly loose-lipped.

  Like Bacchini, he told a story about Warner receiving a bung to support Morocco in 2004. ‘I know they gave, they gave, Jack Warner personally a lot of money for the CONCACAF. But please, this is confidential . . . he got, I think, a million-plus something dollars.’ Bhamjee had been there as an Exco member with a vote. Warner wasn’t the only one allegedly taking bribes. He named three close colleagues from the executive committee whom he claimed had been given cash to vote for Morocco. He believed the amount paid was $250,000 per head. Now he was instructing the lobbyists to do the same if they wished to win over the African voters. ‘We speak to them and say, “You guarantee us your vote” . . . We tell them: “Look, we give you two hundred thousand dollars and if we win the bid, we’ll add on another two hundred thousand dollars”.’

  The old hand confided that he was pessimistic about Qatar’s chances of bringing the World Cup to Doha, although he said it with a heavy heart because he was ‘close’ to Bin Hammam. ‘I doubt most people will go for it because it’s too hot. And although they’ve said they have closed roofs, air-conditioners, it would be very difficult. But I didn’t want to say anything now, because Bin Hammam is a friend of mine.’ Loyalty did not, however, stop him from being even more indiscreet about the activities of his friend’s country. Bhamjee had been told that the Africans would receive payments from Qatar for their 2022 vote. ‘Anything from a quarter to half a million dollars . . . This is separate from the football,’ he said, and it was to be money for their own personal use.27 Bhamjee was later to send a £100,000 invoice to the lobbyists for his advice that evening.

  The recordings continued to roll on. Eaton called up a video which had been filmed in a high-ceilinged salon in Paris where another current official was touting his services as a World Cup consultant for £300,000. This was the moustachioed Slim Aloulou, the 68-year-old chairman of the FIFA disputes resolution committee, who has been around FIFA for 30 years and had spent 16 years on the executive committee before being made an honorary member in 2004.

  The lobbyists enquired as to how World Cup votes had been acquired in the past, and what was a reasonable offer to make. ‘What I can tell you is that a little while ago, these things were really not common, unlike what is said,’ Aloulou replied. ‘Unfortunately, I hear that this kind of practice is spreading more and more. About amounts, I can’t frankly tell you, but these amounts must be quite high. It’s not for peanuts. I can make inquiries and try to figure that out.’ The lobbyists said they were thinking of paying $800,000 per vote for football projects and Aloulou agreed that the figure was in the right ball-park, but thought they would need to up it to ‘around a million dollars’. He explained: ‘Yes, yes! Per member. I think, but the cost might be even higher than I think. I believe it could be around that level. You know, people invest much more than that to get the World Cup.’

  Then there was a series of six phone calls on a crackly line to Mali with Amad
ou Diakite, another former FIFA Exco member, who now served on the referees’ committee. Diakite was also offering his services as a consultant and claimed to be in constant contact with African Exco members – although it wasn’t clear from the recordings whether he was acting through an intermediary. Qatar, according to Diakite, was already in pole position. ‘I think that Qatar could be favourite for 2022. This is the impression I got,’ he said. This was because the Gulf state had offered each of the African members huge sums of money to finance unspecified ‘projects’ in their home countries. ‘I think it’s about one million dollars to one point two million dollars of projects they are going to realise . . . they proposed that to the four African voters this year for projects they are going to do in their country,’ he said. The FIFA official then agreed to find out whether the Africans could be turned away from Qatar and persuaded to vote for America if the consortium purportedly supporting the bid offered more money. He advised that it would be normal to make a financial offer ahead of the ballot and the voters would collect the cash once the bid was successful.28

  The former Exco members were seemingly queuing up to spill the committee’s secrets. There was now a cheerfully chubby Polynesian hogging the screen. Eaton glanced down to his notes. This one had been recorded in a hotel near the airport in Auckland, New Zealand. It was Ahongalu Fusimalohi, the former FIFA executive committee member who had been ousted when Reynald Temarii took his Oceania seat three years earlier. He was keen as mustard to work with the lobbyists and share his wisdom on how to secure votes.

  For Fusimalohi, vote-buying was not in itself wrong, but there was a practical trade-off between the size of the financial reward and the risk if someone found out. As an executive committee member six years previously, he had been offered an unsatisfactory bribe for his vote by the Moroccans, he claimed. ‘They were trying to buy me cheap, but my selling price would have been a full retirement, and in shame, if I was to ever get caught, so I said sorry,’ he said. The amount was a substantial sum, $150,000 or more, but that was not enough. He continued: ‘And they’d put it in a separate bank account and I said, “Bullshit, if I get caught I mean that’s a waste of my whole career. I’m not going to buy into this small-time petty cash money.”’ His advice for the current campaign, however, was to pay a direct bung into the account of his successor, Temarii. ‘You’ve got twenty-four members making that decision,’ he continued. ‘It’s only corrupt if you get caught – these people will go all over the world . . . to get it at any price. It’s sad but it’s true.’

  Assessing the strengths of the various bids, Fusimalohi said England stood little chance because they were too careful to abide by the rules. ‘England have got every reason why they should host the World Cup . . . but they don’t strike the deals,’ he said. He thought Qatar would struggle, too. ‘It is a dream that won’t come true for Bin Hammam. He is really going against Blatter, because it’s part of the challenge to overthrow him next year. If Chung Mong-joon does not stand, then Bin Hammam will stand.’ The winner of the contest to host the World Cup would have to offer financial assistance to the voters or their countries, he said. One of the fake lobbyists asked whether there might be difficulties if FIFA found out. ‘Oh yes,’ Fusimalohi replied. ‘It’s going to be a big problem. It has to be strictly confidential . . . The eleventh commandment of the CIA is just never get caught.’

  It must have been an illuminating few hours for Eaton, discovering the seamy underside of his shiny new employer. Here were four former members of world football’s ruling committee – plus an ex-FIFA employee who had previously worked on World Cup bids – all saying the same thing. In order to win a contest to host the World Cup, you had to bribe some of the voters. The men clearly believed this had happened in the past, yet apparently none of them had reported these practices to the authorities. Moreover, they were now secretly advising these fake lobbyists that cash payments were the route to success in the current contest.

  On the face of it, there were certainly sufficient allegations to investigate the Exco’s dealings with the Moroccan bid. But would Blatter and Valcke really want him to go about prising open a can of worms which was well past its sell-by date? Especially as the claims seemed to implicate the apparently untouchable Jack Warner. Eaton had also learnt that the relationship between Bin Hammam and Blatter needed to be handled with care. And what was Bin Hammam conniving at now? Was there any truth in the claims that Qatar had been offering inducements to the voters, as Bhamjee and Diakite had let slip? Should these allegations be part of a wider probe into Qatar, or should that poisoned chalice be left to the ethics committee?

  It was time for Eaton to turn to the tape of the primary source for the collusion allegations, Zen-Ruffinen. There was a substantial amount of footage of the 51-year-old Swiss lawyer to wade through. He had been filmed at lunch in Geneva, at breakfast in Cairo and finally in his hotel room in London. This was Blatter’s protégé who had worked his way to the very top of FIFA’s bureaucracy before ill-advisedly attempting patricide by going public with a dossier pinning concerns about financial irregularities within the sports body on the president.

  Blatter could not tolerate such a betrayal: ‘The executive committee will deal with our Mr Clean,’ he had tersely told a Swiss newspaper, before Zen-Ruffinen was forced to step down. Yet here was ‘Mr Clean’ rearing his unwelcome head again, only now he was getting grubby by advising these phony lobbyists on how to buy votes, just as the others had done. Although Zen-Ruffinen morally disagreed with vote rigging, he said this was how it worked: for a fee, he would find out what the members wanted and make the right introductions.

  The first video showed Zen-Ruffinen at a table in the chintzy brasserie of the five-star Hotel d’Angleterre on the shores of Lake Geneva. FIFA’s ex-secretary general gave a withering assessment of the men who would vote in the World Cup ballot. It would have been amusing if his allegations weren’t so serious. Inevitably, he started with the notorious Jack Warner, who he described as ‘the biggest gangster you will find on earth’. Zen-Ruffinen alleged that Warner had profited handsomely from previous World Cup bids and would expect his palms to be lavishly greased once again. ‘I can imagine that the total of what he would receive in money and in other advantages would be as a minimum half a million,’ he said.

  Ricardo Teixeira, the Brazilian Exco member, was also allegedly open to offers.29 ‘Teixeira, it’s money. We can go to Rio and talk with him on a terrace, no problem. Openly, openly,’ he said. A third member of the executive committee, he suggested, would have his head turned by ‘ladies and not with money’. A fourth was compromised because a video tape was in circulation which showed him having sex with a prostitute in a hotel room. A fifth, Amos Adamu, would want something for his vote: ‘The guy from Nigeria [Adamu] was also on the list as being okay to accept,’ said Zen-Ruffinen. And a sixth was ‘a nice guy’, but Zen-Ruffinen alleged that his vote was all about money and he was the ‘member who is asking for the most, I can tell you’. Zen-Ruffinen did not know how much it would cost, but he promised ‘I can sort it out.’

  Fast forward to September 2010 and there was Zen-Ruffinen again, a few weeks later, sharing breakfast with the lobbyists in the gardens of Cairo’s luxury Marriott Hotel on the banks of the Nile. This was where the whole of the CAF executive committee was staying in preparation for a crucial meeting to make their final decision on which bid the continent’s four FIFA voters would back in the World Cup ballots. Hayatou, Adamu and Anouma were in town, although Abo Rida was not with them because he was standing for political office in Egypt.

  Zen-Ruffinen had travelled there with the fake lobbyists to get among the voters. Over coffee and croissants, they discussed rumours that Bin Hammam’s fixer Amadou Diallo had sealed the votes of the four African members for Qatar. Zen-Ruffinen knew Diallo well and had been with him in the garden of that very hotel only the previous evening. He described Diallo as ‘a small guy from Guinea’ who had worked his way up through the federati
ons and knew everything about football. ‘This is the kind of person who you never see officially somewhere but he will be everywhere,’ he added enigmatically. ‘He is definitely the right person to talk to because he is the world champion of lobbying.’

  The camera was now jerkily entering a wood-panelled room. It was the office of the president at CAF headquarters in Cairo. The stooped frame of Issa Hayatou was sitting uneasily in a small chair at the centre of the picture wearing a spotlessly white boubou. He leant across to his coffee table and prodded a large carved wooden statue of a British lion to show that its tail was dropping off. The sculpture was falling apart just like the England bid which had presented it to him a year earlier. The side of Zen-Ruffinen’s head popped in and out of the picture as he spoke to Hayatou in French and then translated for the two fake lobbyists.

  The CAF president was explaining why it was important for bidding countries to have the backing of federations across Africa if they wanted the continent’s four votes. The federations had been prohibited from discussing the ballot until the South African World Cup was over, and a special meeting of the CAF executive committee had been convened for 22 September when the continent’s position would be discussed for the first time. ‘He says the CAF statutes give him the right to centralise the African vote if there is a reason for people to do so,’ interpreted Zen-Ruffinen. Hayatou said he might not enforce the rule but he was certainly going to attempt to “harmonise’ the four votes in line with the CAF executive’s wishes. The lobbyists asked what they could do to help influence the decision. There was chatter in French before Zen-Ruffinen came back. ‘OK, so to answer your specific question, I mean, there are discussions in that respect but the [CAF] Executive Committee will decide what kind of support will be requested from the bidders. If this is [in the] interest of Africa. For example, financing football projects somewhere.’