by Tom Bower
Sugar harboured reservations about Roach. Roach had offered to negotiate a friendly match against PSV Eindhoven and had asked both sides for a fee of £30,000. Sugar visited Eindhoven and challenged Roach. ‘I did try,’ the agent laughed. Conflicts of interest appeared to be customary in a sport accustomed to disappearing millions. But Roach resisted any involvement in Sugar’s battle with Venables. He had refused to speak to the television producer who called daily for three weeks. ‘Do you fancy ten years in a cell?’ he asked his friends. That discretion appealed to Sugar. In his bid for Ilie Dumitrescu, Sugar was only concerned about the final price. Roach reported that he had flown to Bucharest and that, over lunch with Cornel Otelea, Steaua’s president, he won the bid at £2.6 million ($4.3 million). On Roach’s advice, the money was transferred to account number Q5727620 at a Swiss bank in Lugano. Unknown to Sugar, Steaua only received £1.4 million. Ilie Dumitrescu received £625,000 and the remaining £625,000 was paid in commissions among four people.
‘Money was paid to other people out of the $4.3 million,’ admitted Colonel Constantin Matei, Steaua’s director of public relations. ‘This is a confidential sum. It is normal for people who help sell a player to be paid. That is our business.’ Subsequently, Cornel Otelea was accused of embezzling the club’s funds. In the trial, Ilie Dumitrescu testified, ‘Mr Roach is the only person who knows more about where the money went.’ Roach expressed his ignorance. The curiosity of the missing million was magnified by Dumitrescu’s poor performance. After just fifteen appearances, Dumitrescu was loaned to Seville, who also declared the player had failed to make a good impression. Ardiles’s judgement was proven to be questionable. Alan Sugar added to the mystery by later alleging that Roach had conducted the negotiations from Monaco rather than in Bucharest, an allegation which Roach strongly denied.
Alan Sugar was in truth perplexed by a fundamental conundrum. There appeared to be no answer to the question: why were football clubs purchasing dud players? At the FA’s headquarters, few showed any appetite to pursue the second question. Dutifully, Graham Kelly had again proposed a compliance unit to scrutinize transfer agreements but Keith Wiseman had been mandated by the Premier League clubs to oppose the proposal. Wiseman acquiesced. He too preferred to gloss over the problem and avoid tackling suspected irregularities. Lamely, Kelly withdrew his suggestion. The only continuing investigation of corruption was being undertaken by the Premier League’s inquiry into ‘Clough’s bung’.
In public, Rick Parry declared after one year, ‘As a result of our efforts things are definitely cleaner.’ He considered that the Inland Revenue investigation into areas where there had been ‘room for abuse’ had resolved some chicanery. In private, however, he complained, ‘We have a bag of money and 183 different stories about where it went.’ The investigation had ballooned into a nightmare. Parry had anticipated a report that would be completed within weeks. None of the three members of the panel had contemplated a full-time inquiry which clashed with their professional careers. Provable facts, however, eluded the trio; the football clubs were worse than reluctant witnesses. Unknown to the FA, in 1994 the management of Manchester United had accepted from Alex Ferguson a brown parcel containing £40,000 in cash, given to Ferguson by Grigory Essaoulenko, the vice-president of Spartak Moscow, at the end of transfer talks about Andrei Kanchelskis, a forward. The money was placed in the club’s safe. In the atmosphere of the ‘bungs’ inquiry, the club’s managers preferred not to disclose the ‘gift’ to the FA, as required by the rules. The uproar could have been catastrophic. After one year the parcel was quietly returned. By then, the criticism had diminished.
Kate Hoey’s damnation of Venables’s dishonesty in the House of Commons had attracted considerable criticism but she had been unable to produce any incriminating evidence, and the football group among Labour MPs refused to offer any support. The BBC, she decided, appeared to be more concerned to avoid annoying football’s executives than pursuing her allegations. A visit to her office in the Commons by David Davies, the FA’s director of public affairs, and Mike Lee representing the Premier League, further undermined her credibility. Davies reported that Kate Hoey possessed no evidence and lacked a proper understanding of football. Hoey was unsurprised by Davies’s antipathy. Terry Venables was a fellow employee of the FA and Graham Kelly had declared that Venables’s business affairs were of no concern.
That lack of interest demonstrated the obstacles for Robert Reid’s inquiry. After interviewing club officials Reid had dispatched specialists to examine the accounts of several clubs, including Tottenham, Arsenal and Nottingham Forest. The disappearance of money, they reported, was blatant. ‘Clearly money has gone,’ repeated Rick Parry, ‘but we don’t know where.’ Postdated invoices had been inserted into records months after transactions. ‘A lot of the evidence doesn’t stack up,’ Reid said. And allegations of corruption, he agreed, however, ‘on examination evaporated without substantiation’. Detectives were hired by Reid to trace money transferred from the football clubs to offshore accounts but the identities of the account holders were withheld by the banks. After several payments of extra fees to the detectives had produced no evidence they were fired.
The inquiry’s salvation was the provision by the Norwegian tax authorities of Rune Hauge’s records, seized from his office, but this awakened their taste for more. The best source of new information would have been the football agents, but since they were unauthorized and unregulated, they were unwilling to reveal their accounts. Neither the Premier League nor the FA could compel them to testify. Frank McLintock gave one unsatisfactory interview and then refused further cooperation, and Hauge refused after the first interview to continue providing evidence. Other interviews, often separated by two or three months, in London, Liverpool, Manchester, Oslo and Malta often ended in frustration. Brian Clough withdrew his cooperation after suffering memory lapses on crucial questions; Fenton admitted that Clough had once received £8,000 at a motorway service station, but Fenton’s veracity was questionable; while Terry Venables, discomforted by the exposure of his contradictory evidence, stormed out of an interview.
Terry Venables’s intransigence was encouraged by Graham Kelly. The FA’s chief executive had come to detest Alan Sugar. In repeated telephone calls, the businessman cursed, ‘Venables is putting the knife into me.’ In Sugar’s mind, Venables and Kelly, inhabiting the same building, were perpetually plotting. ‘He’s upstairs with his tactics board,’ insisted Kelly, ‘not popping into my office discussing loans five years ago.’ Sugar was unpersuaded. His appeal against the £600,000 fine, twelve points deduction and exclusion from the FA Cup won a revised punishment: only six points were deducted but the ban from the FA Cup remained and the fine was increased to £1.5 million. Vowing a second appeal and an application to the High Court, which eventually restored all Tottenham’s points and its participation in the FA Cup, Sugar attacked the FA’s ‘outrageous fine . . . especially bearing in mind that all the information provided to the FA was on a voluntary basis’. The inaccuracy of that protest – the information was volunteered two-and-a-half years after the discovery of the ‘Barnes file’ and after Eddie Ashby had disclosed its contents to Granada TV – did not endear Sugar to his critics, especially as England’s fortunes under Venables improved.
‘Venables the Saviour’ was short-lived. As England’s performances during 1995 encouraged criticism, Venables’s defences against his other pursuers crumbled. In early 1996, the Inland Revenue’s investigation of his income since 1984 had produced the records of account number 59651156, his deposits at the NatWest Bank in Jersey. The statements of 1992 recorded that his deposit had increased from £71,000 to £670,473. Paul Kendrew asked Venables to explain the source of £950,000 in his several bank accounts, to produce the records of his account at the Orion Trust in Guernsey, to provide a copy of his contracts with Barcelona, and to explain how he had funded his purchases of the Royal Oak pub, 6 Oxford Gate, a flat in Kensington and a house in Brompton Park
Crescent. Resolutely, Venables refused any explanations. In exasperation, the Inland Revenue demanded an immediate payment of £54,000 for unpaid taxes.
Venables’s plight could not be concealed. Although he successfully negotiated a settlement with the liquidator of Edennote, his company, at 50 pence in the £1, costing £580,000, others could not be so easily assuaged. Martin Roberts at the DTI was infuriated by the decision of George Staple, the director of the Serious Fraud Office, not to prosecute Venables on eleven charges. Roberts threatened Staple that he would refer the SFO’s refusal to 10 Downing Street. In consolation, the DTI sought Venables’s disqualification as a company director on the eve of the opening of Alan Sugar’s libel action against his enemy. Venables found the pressure of coaching the England team and the fight for his reputation, even with Eddie Ashby’s full-time assistance, too exhausting. In January 1996, he told Graham Kelly that he wanted either an immediate extension to his contract or he would resign after the Euro ’96 competition.
Graham Kelly was appalled; exposure of Venables’s deceit was irrelevant to him and he was proudly loyal to Venables. ‘I tried to persuade him to carry on,’ recalled Kelly, ‘but he insisted on resigning because the FA was not supporting him. Like most managers, Venables is very stubborn and he would not be shifted. He had made up his mind.’ With notable consideration, Kelly made a distinction between a child abuser and Venables’s ‘business mismanagement’. In Kelly’s judgement, Venables was not disqualified to be England’s football coach just because, ‘he is not the most careful businessman in the world. He is of sufficient character to be England’s national coach.’
Kelly accurately reflected the sentiment of the fans on the terraces; they were amused by Terry’s dishonesty, and paraded their unconcern about being ripped off. Among those sympathizers was Tony Banks, the Labour MP and future minister of sport: ‘I’m not required to judge Terry. I have no material evidence. There is no evidence. I don’t want to be put in a position where I should criticize. I just would not want him to look after my pension. It’s subjective. I admire him but I am under no illusions.’ That conditional generosity was not limited to Terry Venables but extended to his self-proclaimed disciple, George Graham.
The fate of George Graham encouraged those who resented any regulation. In July 1995, Graham was banned by the FA for one year for his acceptance of money from Rune Hauge. To the further dismay of the FA’s critics, the complete report describing Graham’s corruption compiled by Robert Reid and Rick Parry had not been published. Discreet lobbying had protected Graham and Arsenal from further embarrassment. That discretion was compromised in November 1995. Reflecting footballers’ general insensitivity, George Graham accepted £250,000 from the Sun for the serialization of his autobiography, promoting an aggressive whitewash of his conduct. Even Graham Kelly was outraged by George Graham’s brashness and ordered the publication of the full report. The truth, however, did not hinder Graham’s resurrection. At the end of his one year ban in 1996, he was appointed manager of Leeds. Few questioned the propriety of a corrupt manager returning to Premier League football. As a senior member of football’s freemasonry, Graham was protected. On 26 October 1996, he accompanied his new team to play at Highbury. Graham’s lack of shame was matched by the polite welcome from Arsenal’s supporters, enhanced when the visitors were defeated by three goals. Graham stayed away from the Arsenal directors’ box. Not because of any embarrassment, but out of anger.
The corrupt payments which Graham had accepted, it was agreed by the football fraternity, were exceptional. The problem was not widespread. His confession of dishonesty had become obliterated, a forgotten interlude in a forty year career. Graham’s rapid resurrection – he also appeared as a frequent pundit on Sky Sports – was testimony to football’s gospel. Even the Serious Fraud Office had abandoned an investigation. Few cared that Steve Burtenshaw, Arsenal’s former scout who had admitted receiving £35,000 from Rune Hauge in 1992, had become QPR’s chief scout after his dismissal by Arsenal in February 1995. ‘There was no proof against him when he was employed by us,’ said a director of QPR who, ironically, resolutely attacks dishonesty in football.
The mitigation extended to Rune Hauge; the lifetime ban imposed by FIFA was reduced on appeal to two years. Until he could officially resume business in March 1997, he operated unhindered using Frank Mathiesen, a Danish registered agent, and brokered the sales of Gunnar Halle, a Norwegian defender, to George Graham at Leeds, Ole Gunnar Solskjaer to Manchester United and Allan Nielsen to Tottenham. Ignoring Hauge, the clubs’ managers, including Alex Ferguson, decided, would be counter-productive since he controlled the best Scandinavian players. Hauge’s admission of paying bribes to other, unnamed British managers was assumed to be true. Finding more incriminating evidence, however, was proving to be difficult.
By 1996, after questioning over thirty witnesses in two years (the total would be sixty-six), Robert Reid QC, the lawyer and chairman, acknowledged a serious flaw in their technique. Those involved in the world of football were not accustomed to normal values of honest testimony. Lying was their lingua franca. Precise questioning, as was the custom in the High Court, was self-defeating. His stern cross-examination was preventing any cosy relationships developing with potential informants. ‘We’re not giving the suspects enough rope to hang themselves,’ he realized. ‘Too many avenues are being blocked off.’
The impetus to find the truth and impose any punishment was waning, and the organization of the inquiry by the Premier League was at best lacklustre. Making the arrangements for all three members of the panel to agree a place and date to interview a witness was problematic. Weeks would pass without a single interview. The panel’s will-power was lapsing. The sight of endless lever arch files filled with ‘inconsistencies, things we couldn’t fathom and facts we couldn’t understand’ depressed Reid. ‘This is spiralling out of control,’ he conceded. ‘We’re hampered by the lack of powers of compulsion.’
At the heart of Reid’s bewilderment was the identical but implausible stories of Frank McLintock, the agent, and Teddy Sheringham, the footballer. McLintock had described his drive north from London, his concealment in his loft of the £58,000 in cash which he had received from Tottenham, and his meeting that evening with Sheringham for a drink. Initially, Sheringham told Reid that he had never travelled in McLintock’s car. ‘I just went home,’ said Sheringham in February 1994. Later Sheringham agreed that the two had driven alone in McLintock’s car to a pub. Both denied meeting Ronnie Fenton, the assistant manager of Nottingham Forest, employed during the inquiry as a scout for Leeds and England.
Sheringham was the image of honesty. ‘Did you get into the front or back of the car when you went with McLintock for a drink?’ he had been asked in a throwaway question. ‘Into the back,’ replied the footballer. On rereading the transcript, Parry and Reid were puzzled. There were only two men in the car, so why would Sheringham sit in the back, leaving the front passenger seat empty? ‘The story doesn’t stack up,’ grumbled Parry. He and Reid compared the statements, back and forth. Reid telephoned Brian Clough. Unsurprisingly, the manager sounded drunk. During their rambling conversation, Reid was struck by a throwaway remark. Unprompted, Clough mentioned a meeting between McLintock, Sheringham and Fenton at the Posthouse Hotel in Luton on the night of Sheringham’s transfer. Until Clough’s comment that meeting had never been mentioned. Reading the statements again Reid realized that all three witnesses had lied. Sheringham’s car ride on the back seat suddenly made sense: the box containing £58,000 had been placed on the front passenger seat to give to Fenton. That evening, in Sheringham’s sight, McLintock had handed Fenton the £58,000. Sheringham was recalled for questioning. ‘I lied,’ admitted the footballer, ‘because I didn’t want to get anyone into trouble.’ The conspiracy had unravelled; the lies were blatant and foolish. The investigators’ skill was to correctly interpret the deception.
To conceal the true fate of the £58,000 payment from Tottenham, Frank Mc
Lintock and his partner, Graham Smith, had provided a phoney invoice for building work which was dated before the cash was even received. Yet the builder denied receiving any money. The conspirators’ foolishness was breathtaking. Parry expressed shock that the witnesses had ‘lied again and again’.
Terry Venables was also repeatedly inconsistent. On one occasion, Venables denied knowing about the £58,000 payment until two days after the event; in another version he heard about the payment only four months later; and in his autobiography he offered a third explanation. Eddie Ashby’s evidence was similarly inconsistent. In his desire to support Venables, Ashby could barely remember his previous version. ‘If Terry changes his story now,’ worried Ashby secretly, ‘he’ll drop me in it.’ Parry and Reid agreed that both were lying; the evidence proved that on Venables’s orders Ashby had asked for the cash from Tottenham’s finance director, which he knew was not McLintock’s fee but a vital ingredient of the transfer. One major flaw was the absence of any incontrovertible evidence that money had been paid to Clough.
The increasing popularity and wealth of the Premier League led to diminishing interest in the inquiry’s conclusions. The twenty Premier League chairmen had a vested interest in dismissing the ‘bungs’ as unrepeatable history. Graham Kelly was optimistic that football was cleansing itself. That opinion was shared by Keith Wiseman on his election on 11 July 1996 as the FA’s chairman, replacing Bert Millichip. Sleaze, pronounced Wiseman, was ‘an odd residue of a difficult past’. In the future, he asserted, reflecting the FA’s tolerance of conflicts of interest, there would never be another ‘bungs’ inquiry. One unexpected consequence of Wiseman’s prediction was to discourage the critics and encourage the guilty to defy their accusers, disrupting the final stages of the inquiry in 1997.
