For lovers of football, who do not want to believe that the men in charge of the world game are mired in corruption, or that they become involuntarily greedy once a grinning captain ushers them into his ship of plenty, there is some heart to be taken from the scandal which began to sink it. After all the many years of furious denial, it was really the first actual, publicly accepted instance of proven corruption at this high level in Fifa. That the first member of the executive committee to be exposed in this way was Blatter’s challenger for an election four days later was so convenient, it still leaves a lingering trail of discomfort. Whichever way you look at it, though, it turned out that it was no fit-up of Mohamed bin Hammam and Jack Warner. They really did go to that hotel in Trinidad, bin Hammam pitched for the votes of delegates from the small island FAs in the Caribbean Football Union, who were then offered $40,000 in cash, in actual brown envelopes. Warner said it was ‘a gift’, that it could be used for football development–so casually was this most important work of Fifa used as a label for money washing around.
And yet, in the fall of Fifa which inexorably resulted from it, this concrete, blatant episode of corruption can be clung to as a restorer of faith in people, in football people: it was undone because there were some honest souls in the room. The story, which had dropped bewilderingly among us in the already feverish gathering of Blatter’s re-election congress, was illuminated more clearly in the years which have followed. Bin Hammam was banned from football for life by Fifa’s ethics committee, which he appealed to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS). There were hearings, public decisions, including the reasoning of the ethics committee chaired by the Namibian judge Petrus Damaseb when suspending Warner and bin Hammam before the election. Evidence and documents spilled out from various sources, revealing what had happened almost in full. They exposed the insides of Fifa’s business beyond the ground covered in the preceding decades, providing a chronicled account of those far-reaching days in May.
Looking back, it is remarkable that bin Hammam and Warner risked this, so brazenly, in front of so many people, so soon before an election. The only possible explanation for this is that they believed everybody in the room would eagerly accept $40,000 in cash. That suggests that handing out cash was a feature of the culture of Fifa, not an outlandish thing to happen, as Warner would later assert. But, clearly, some people assembled at the hotel did not accept that it was.
The facts, as they emerged in the hearings and were accepted by the lawyers presiding over the judgement at CAS, began with bin Hammam indeed going to Trinidad, to talk to the delegates from the member associations of the CFU, on 10 May 2011. The meeting was held at the Hyatt Regency in the capital of Warner’s island, Port of Spain. It is, of course, a plush establishment, commanding views of the ocean, of a uniform standard with the international chain hotels in which Fifa business is routinely conducted, a level below the independent world-class heights of the Baur au Lac in Zurich. It describes itself as ‘a stunning Trinidad hotel and conference center’, offering ‘unprecedented luxuries in a breathtaking Caribbean destination’.
Bin Hammam had said that he could not obtain a visa to the US, and so could not go to the congress of the whole confederation of the Americas, Concacaf, which took place in Miami on 3 May. Warner, who had always marshalled the Caribbean countries as a block vote within his Concacaf presidency, had called a special meeting of the CFU on 10–11 May, at which bin Hammam would present his virtues as a candidate. Warner had told bin Hammam he would have to pay all the expenses, including hiring the Hyatt, and paying the substantial costs of travel and accommodation for the delegates, who otherwise had no reason to go. Bin Hammam was both exceptionally wealthy, through his Kemco construction company which had worked at the heart of Qatar’s building boom after oil and gas were discovered, and used to paying out money to smooth his Fifa journey. He duly wired $360,000 to the CFU for expenses, and subsequently handed over a further $50,000 for additional expenses which might be incurred.
That $410,000 was not the money which was even the subject of the corruption claims; it was just a routine bit of expenditure for bin Hammam to hold a day and an overnight of Fifa meetings for some voters in the Fifa presidential election. It even emerged that Warner’s own travel company, Simpaul, in Trinidad, had booked the tickets. Blazer, it was revealed later, had not wanted this to happen; he had told Warner there were ‘ethical problems’ with holding such a special meeting, which bin Hammam was paying for in order to present his candidacy to just the CFU voting associations. But Warner did not listen, which was said to have riled Blazer for a start. Bin Hammam flew in to Port of Spain on 9 May 2011, the day before the scheduled special meeting. He was with Fifa and AFC associates, including Worawi Makudi, the president of the Thailand FA.
Angenie Kanhai, the secretary general of the CFU, told the CAS hearing that as Warner was the minister of transport in Trinidad and Tobago at the time, his government ministry’s protocol officer met bin Hammam at the airport. So the government of the Caribbean island was used in the service of a candidate for the Fifa election.
For all the time and expense of travelling such a distance to this meeting, bin Hammam only spoke about his candidacy for around forty-five minutes, humbly asking for the assembly’s vote in the election against Blatter. After that, according to witnesses, Warner announced that there were ‘gifts’ for the delegates, and they should go up to one of the hotel rooms, which was being used by the CFU as a boardroom, to pick the gifts up, one by one, between 3 and 5 p.m.
The CAS judgement, issued in July 2012, recited what happened next:
‘In the afternoon of May 10 2011… Ms Angenie Kanhai went to Mr Warner’s office to collect a locked suitcase, which she then took back to the Hyatt and handed over to her assistants, Mr Jason Sylvester and Ms Debbie Minguell. The suitcase contained a number of unmarked envelopes, each containing $40,000.’
Kanhai, who did give evidence to CAS, provided this description: ‘The suitcase was a very good quality one, orange and black,’ she told the hearing, ‘and it was not the kind of suitcase that Mr Warner normally uses.’
In his report about the affair compiled for Blazer, the lawyer John Collins wrote that there was in total $1m cash in the suitcase. After Warner announced there were gifts for the delegates, they began to go separately into the boardroom. There, they were each handed one of the envelopes, with $40,000 inside it.
‘Some of the delegates were told at the time that the cash was a gift from the CFU to their national association for the development of football,’ the CAS judgement narrated.
One of the delegates at the meeting, whose account of what happened was subsequently a central part of the evidence, was Frederick Lunn. He was the executive vice president of the Bahamas FA, there as its representative among the other FAs of the Caribbean. Lunn said that he went up to the boardroom at around 3 p.m., and there were other CFU representatives sitting around in the lobby area. He said the boardroom door was locked when he first knocked, he was asked to wait, then, after a few minutes, another delegate to the meeting, whom he didn’t know, left the room and he was invited to go in. He said he entered, that Debbie Minguell was sitting at the boardroom table at the back of the room, she asked him to sign and print his name on a form, then a man, whom he did not know (later confirmed to be Jason Sylvester, the CFU staffer), handed him an envelope, stapled shut, with the word ‘Bahamas’ handwritten on the cover.
‘I opened the envelope and dumped the contents on the board room table. I observed US currency, four stacks of $100 bills fall out of the envelope and onto the conference table,’ Lunn later affirmed in his statement of evidence.
‘I asked Ms Minguell and the male what this was for, and was told that it was $40,000 in cash, and that it was a gift from the CFU,’ Lunn stated. ‘Ms Minguell asked me to count the cash, and I declined. Ms Minguell also stated that I should not discuss the cash with anyone else, and that I should conceal it so that others would not know I had received the money.’
Lunn said that he told Debbie Minguell he was not authorised to accept the money, ‘and that I could not take the cash through the United States when travelling back to the Bahamas. Ms Minguell responded that I should mail the money back to the Bahamas.’
Lunn said that he decided to hold on to the money and contact the president of the Bahamas FA, Anton Sealey, about it. He took his jacket off and covered the envelope with it, so that when he left the room, nobody waiting outside would see he was carrying it. He texted Anton Sealey at 3.18 p.m. asking him to call urgently. Sealey’s recollection, given in an affidavit of evidence, was:
‘I promptly called Mr Lunn who told me that he had just been handed a package containing US$40,000 in cash as a “gift” for attending the special bin Hammam CFU meeting. He asked me if I knew anything about this cash gift. I told him that I did not and that under no circumstances would the BFA [the Bahamas FA] accept such a cash gift. I told Mr Lunn to return the cash and make sure that the individuals in the conference room change the sign-in sheet to make it clear that he had returned the money.’
At 3.33 p.m., Lunn took a picture of the cash and envelope with his Sony camera–the photograph which would go round the world as an indelible image of Fifa corruption: dollar bills, in a brown envelope. Then he went to give it back. He stuffed the envelope, with the cash in it, ‘in the waist of my pants’, so that it wouldn’t be seen. He said that he told Debbie Minguell and the man whom he did not know, that the Bahamas FA would not be accepting the gift; they said it was no problem, and took the money back.
The texts between Lunn and Sealey became part of the evidence. This crudest form of corruption, which had always been denied at Fifa–paying stacks of cash, for votes–was being played out while, remarkably, the televisions in the hotel were broadcasting reports of the parliamentary committee in London which had that morning heard from Triesman and the allegations of bribes paid by the Qatar bid.
Lunn’s text at 4.23 p.m. read: ‘Sealey a lot of the boys taking the cash this is sad given the breaking news on the tv CNN right as I type the note. I’m truly surprise [sic] it’s happening at this conference.’
Sealey replied: ‘I am disappointed but not surprised. It is important that we maintain our integrity when the story is told. That money will not make or break our association. You can leave with your head high.’
Lunn then asked: ‘Should I save the photo for you to see?’
‘Of course,’ Sealey replied. ‘I have never seen that amount of money. I need to see what it looks like. LOL.’
‘It hurt to give it back,’ Lunn texted, ‘what bill it could pay. But it was the right decision. They said no problem.’
At 5 p.m., still at the Hyatt, Fred Lunn called David Sabir, the secretary general of another Caribbean FA at the bin Hammam gathering: Bermuda. Sabir’s experience had been identical; he had been invited into the boardroom, given the envelope with $40,000 in cash, but had not accepted it, and called Larry Mussenden, his FA president. Mussenden is a senior member of the legal establishment in Bermuda, having qualified as a barrister in 1995; he also served as a major in the Bermuda regiment for sixteen years. He had been appointed a senator in 2003, from 2004 to 2006 he was the attorney general and minister of justice, offices which made him the chief legal adviser to the Bermuda government. At the time Fred Lunn was in Trinidad with the brown envelope of cash down his trousers, Mussenden had his own law firm, was president of the Bermuda FA and chairman of Fifa’s own appeals committee. In March 2016 he was appointed director of public prosecutions in Bermuda. When he took the call from Sabir, Mussenden does not appear to have wanted to jeopardise all of that career and reputation for $40,000 dished out by Mohamed bin Hammam and Jack Warner in a brown envelope.
In the account of Mussenden’s reaction related by Damaseb’s ethics committee judgement: ‘Mr Mussenden had advised [David Sabir] that the Bermuda Football Association would not accept any cash gifts and that if any contribution was to be made to the Bermuda Football Association it would have to be accompanied by the proper letters authorising such contribution and it would need to be wire transferred.’
Another delegate at the meeting who refused to accept the money and later spoke about it was Sonia Bien-Aime. She was secretary general of the Turks and Caicos Islands Football Association, the archipelago of coral islands, still a British Overseas Territory, with a total population of 33,000, near the Bahamas. She confirmed to Collins that she had been offered $40,000 in cash, had called her FA president, Christopher Bryan, and he had said she should not accept it.
What happened next turned into the firing of the torpedo into the hull of the Fifa bateau: Anton Sealey called Chuck Blazer. Sealey told him about the money, that at this meeting called by Warner to hear bin Hammam’s presidential credentials, $40,000 in cash had been handed out as a cash ‘gift’. Sealey asked him if this money had possibly come from the CFU, as stated, and Blazer told him the CFU did not have access to anything like that sort of money.
Blazer, in his evidence, given to Damaseb’s hastily convened ethics committee inquiry, revealed that he had not wanted Warner to hold this meeting and had said bin Hammam should speak at the Concacaf congress. He said that Sealey had called him, told him that Fred Lunn had been offered the $40,000 in cash, and this was ‘a very unusual, and what he felt, uncomfortable situation’. Blazer, oddly, did not call Warner then, but said he emailed him, at four o’clock the following morning, 11 May 2011. He said Warner replied that he would call him at 8 a.m.; in fact Warner did not call Blazer until 2 p.m.
Warner, after receiving the email from Blazer, brought forward the next day’s morning meeting from its scheduled start at 10 a.m., to 8.30. At it, he hectored the attendees in characteristically florid tones and, this time, language which damned him. Fred Lunn said that Warner told them he had already received calls from both Fifa and Concacaf about the ‘cash gift’ and that Warner pronounced himself: ‘Disappointed with some of the attendees who told Concacaf about the money contrary to the CFU’s instructions.’
A film of Warner’s speech was later leaked, and it was a fine and strident lecture in the requirements of omertà, delivered in Warner’s unique style:
‘There are some people here who believe they are more pious than thou,’ Warner told them. ‘If you are pious, open a church, friend. But the fact is, that our business is our business. You can come in here to cuss and disagree and rave and rant but when we leave here, our business is our business. And that is what solidarity is about.’
He moved on to give an explanation, which confirmed that bin Hammam had been the source of the $1m, explaining that a suitcase of cash was nothing out of the ordinary; he had brought it to save him carting actual gifts halfway across the world to the meeting:
‘It was given to you because he said he could not bring the silver tray and some silver trinkets and so on. So I said forget all of that, put a value on it and give it to the countries. And the gift you get is for you to determine how best you want to use it for development of football in your country.’
Warner said it could be used for ‘grass roots programmes’, or whatever they wanted.
‘But it is not a gift that I told him to give to you, because… I didn’t want him to appear that he is buying votes.’
Warner said: ‘If there is anybody here who has a conscience, and wishes to send back the money, I am willing to take it and give it back to him at any moment. Or conversely, you think you don’t want it, then give it to somebody else who you think is in need.’
Warner looked around the room and suggested some of the other FAs to which the money could be given, mischievously naming his own, Trinidad and Tobago. Then he repeated his warning: ‘But don’t go and talk about it outside, and believe that you are pious and you are holy, and you are better than anybody else. I hope that is very clear.’
They all sat and listened to this blatant, casually delivered threat to keep the episode in-house, but it was too late for that. Sealey had already called Blazer, the secrets were out, and Blazer was sweating extremely worriedly on the implications. Blazer’s account was that when Warner finally called him back at 2 p.m. that second day, 11 May, Warner was relaxed about it all, saying: ‘bin Hammam was going to be giving out money and he didn’t want it to come from him [bin Hammam].’
‘I said to him, I said: “Listen,”’ Blazer told the ethics committee when he gave evidence in person, ‘I said: “I’m getting calls that people are complaining that there’s money being given out. What sort of response am I able to give them? Where is this, what is this about?”’
Warner, Blazer said, replied that the money was instead of gifts, and that ‘even the president’, meaning Blatter, ‘knows about it and I’ve got his okay’.
Both Blazer and bin Hammam gave this evidence, that Warner had said Blatter had known about it and given the OK. Warner was ultimately to deny having said that.
Afterwards, Blazer was hailed as a whistleblower, a figure who had stood up for ethics at Fifa, and for a brief time, while he was still free to, Blazer revelled in that saintly status. At the time, I fished out the card he had given me at the Emirates Palace Hotel in Abu Dhabi and called him, and he told me he had reported Warner because: ‘I believe it was the right thing to do.’
Now, when the world knows that Blazer had been taking kickbacks and embezzling money, and not paying tax, for years, it is clear it was not that straightforward. There are theories about why, really, he turned whistleblower, called Jérôme Valcke and set in train the whole ethics committee procedure which would blow bin Hammam out of the presidential race and also send Warner spiralling out of football. But actually and probably unwittingly, Blazer gave away a persuasive explanation for why he did it, in his own evidence to the ethics committee. After Warner blithely told him the cash gifts were fine and Blatter had sanctioned them, Blazer said he replied:
‘Jack, listen, this is not an answer that I can give anybody. There is absolutely no justification of what you’re telling me. There’s nothing that I can say in what you’re telling me that I could even expect anybody else to understand.’
Blazer put his predicament, then, in terms of needing an explanation from Warner for the honest people, how he could reassure them that nothing corrupt was going on–which might lead to further difficult questions. Blazer appears to have been instinctively alarmed, that this episode was reckless, much too public and uncomfortably close to home.
Damaseb’s five-man committee asked Blazer about Warner and their relationship. In Concacaf, they went back as far as 1983, Blazer said. Within a couple of years from meeting then, they had realised ‘the opportunity was there to consolidate the votes of the Caribbean’, uniting the islands to cast their votes as a block of thirty-one among Concacaf’s forty-one countries. That would ensure a president could be elected from that relatively provincial part of the Americas, rather than Mexico or the other bigger football countries, and enable Warner to wield influence there, and at Fifa. Blazer soon suggested to Warner he should go for it. He said that the very day after Trinidad and Tobago missed out on qualifying for the 1990 World Cup, losing 1–0 at home to the USA in that notorious match, Blazer had gone round to his house and suggested Warner stand for president.
‘It was a discussion that he and I had had in 1986 when we looked at the old men that were sitting up in front of the room at that time and… said: “One day, you know, it’ll be us.”’
Warner won the election on the vote of the numerically superior smaller associations of the Caribbean, and he then immediately elevated Blazer from his role in the US FA to become secretary general of Concacaf. Blazer boasted a little about what a good job they had done together since taking over; the confederation had had only $50,000 in the bank, he said, but now it had ‘a good marketing programme, good competitions, good support… good staff, good people’. And they had been able to stay in control for twenty years–Warner, he said, had been able to keep ‘the base of the votes, the core votes, together in the Caribbean’.
But Warner had in more recent times become erratic and more difficult to deal with, Blazer said; there was ‘a major change in his whole attitude’. He had become involved in real politics at home–he was actually an MP and a government minister–and had been stepping back from his Concacaf activities.
‘There are times when he thinks he’s above it all,’ Blazer said. ‘And that’s certainly the attitude that I found in this case when I dealt with him and spoke with him about it, as if: “I can do whatever I want.”’
The next passage of explanation is acutely revealing of the culture they had shaped and protected, and how Blazer saw it. It is only so clear now because the world knows about the financial takings Blazer and Warner were helping themselves to in all the years at Concacaf, when their business was their business and nobody more pious than them knew about it:
‘It’s one thing if [Warner] wants to harm himself,’ Blazer said, referring to the 2006 ticketing scam which was at that point the only decided case of misconduct against Warner. ‘If he sells a World Cup ticket at a profit and he… gets his knuckles rapped on it, that’s one thing.
‘But when he starts to turn around and put packages of money together to give to our member associations, many of whom are unsuspecting, many of whom don’t know [my italics]; and many of whom, like Anton Sealey who is–you know he’s a member of his national bank. He’s–this is a guy who is a straight citizen.
‘When you start putting people like that in jeopardy it crosses the line… It wasn’t a personal issue, I just had to stop that from being the case and I had to report it. It was my obligation to do so.’
It is difficult to read this explanation for why Chuck Blazer reported his partner of twenty years at Concacaf, without seeing it as expressing a need to stop Warner from further breaching the omertà. Perhaps the opportunity to deal a fatal blow to bin Hammam played into Blazer’s decision as well; perhaps he believed Blatter would usefully owe him for removing his presidential opponent. But actually, like Valcke, nobody within Fifa seems to have believed bin Hammam stood a chance of beating Blatter for votes, and even after all this, Warner might have wielded the Caribbean block vote for Blatter. Blazer’s motives seem much closer to his own interests than those political calculations. He appears to have been greatly concerned, flustered, that Warner, by engaging in an episode as reckless as cash in brown envelopes, handed to all the associations, was doing exactly what Warner cautioned the Caribbean FAs not to do: showing the world their ‘business’. By conducting business like this, outside of their closed doors, involving ‘a straight citizen’ like Anton Sealey who would need a convincing answer that all was above board, Warner was becoming a liability. If Blazer had no ‘answer he could give’ to a straight citizen like Anton Sealey, but did nothing about reporting the incident either, perhaps the straight citizens would start to wonder about him. And so, Blazer had to report Warner. He was not being more pious than thou; he was doing necessary business.
At 8.30 on the morning of 12 May, Blazer called Valcke. ‘I said: “We have to deal with this and we need to deal with this in some quick fashion,”’ Blazer told the ethics committee.
It then happened extremely quickly–the election was barely more than two weeks away. Blazer contacted John Collins, the attorney, on 15 May, to carry out a full inquiry, and Collins talked to Lunn, Sealey, Sabir and Mussenden, and gathered evidence from them. He said he talked at length to Sonia Bien-Aime but that although she confirmed what had happened, she did not want to go on record and swear an affidavit of evidence. Collins told the ethics committee: ‘She was concerned that the Caribbean is a series of small islands and there could be retribution if something happened in the case.’
Blazer himself also told the committee that Bien-Aime ‘felt in jeopardy’, and ‘intimidated’, about giving her evidence, after the members had been told not to provide information.
I did ask her, Lunn, Sealey, Sabir and Mussenden to talk about their experiences, telling all of them it appeared to be heartening that they stood out in the fall of Fifa as honest people who did what was right. None was prepared to do so. Bien-Aime did not reply, nor did Lunn or Sealey, to repeated requests. Mussenden’s office in the ministry of legal affairs of the Bermuda government responded to say: ‘Please be advised that Mr Mussenden declines the invitation for an interview.’
Sabir also declined, but his reply was a little fuller: ‘While my position on the issue of good governance and integrity, in particular, the fight against corruption in football is unwavering I respectfully decline your request for such an interview at this time.’
I got the impression that for these people, too, standing up so publicly, through a tremendous, globally exposing process which saw many of their long-term colleagues at other FAs disciplined, banned or lose their jobs, had not been easy. And that the Caribbean is indeed a small place for all of this to happen.
John Collins was forthright in his report and evidence and he concluded that the money was provided by bin Hammam in ‘a campaign to buy the voting needed to win the election’. Collins believed that was the reason bin Hammam had not gone to the Concacaf congress in Miami, and deliberately went to Trinidad instead–in a private plane, Blazer said–because he would not be subjected to the same level of scrutiny and questions about arriving with a suitcase full of dollars. CAS did not rule on that point; in fact their judgement accepted as a fact that bin Hammam was denied a visa to the US.
Collins’ report concluded: ‘Mr bin Hammam and Mr Warner caused cash payments totalling approximately $1m to be paid or attempted to be paid to officials… Mr bin Hammam and Mr Warner organised this special meeting of CFU officials for the express purpose of allowing Mr bin Hammam to represent his candidacy to these Fifa voting members, ask for their vote, and present his $40,000 cash “gift” to each one. This gift was in addition to paying all the travel costs for these officials to attend this “special meeting” in Trinidad.’
The politics of Fifa did, surely, influence the speed with which the pair was dispatched by the ethics committee and bin Hammam ejected from the presidential election. At that time, the ethics committee was not independent–that, to be fair to Blatter, was introduced as part of the reforms after he won his one-man election. In effect, the president asked the ethics committee to investigate possible breaches, a very handy power for Blatter. Collins’ report was only completed and sent to Valcke on 24 May, one week before the election was to be held. Valcke immediately asked the ethics committee to investigate and they found the time to do so straight away.
The ethics committee wrote to bin Hammam the next day, 25 May, telling him he was under investigation for multiple breaches of the Fifa code, including possible bribery, and inviting him to attend a hearing in Zurich on 29 May. On 28 May, with so many Fifa delegates and the world’s media gathered in Zurich for the congress, he announced he was stepping down from the presidential race. On 29 May itself, the ethics committee provisionally banned bin Hammam and Warner from all football activities, and Damaseb was giving his unconvincing performance in the press conference, which I attended, announcing the bans to the world. That was five days from the arrival of Collins’ report in Valcke’s inbox, to Blatter having an unopposed election for another term as president.
Blatter’s evidence to the committee, a transcript of which has also been leaked, was a masterclass in presidential grandstanding and exposition of his ease with the levers of Fifa power. Blatter was, after all, accused of serious ethics breaches, of having sanctioned the payments: David Sabir and Blazer both said that Warner told them he had cleared the ‘gifts’ in advance with Blatter. When he sat down in front of the committee, Blatter was greeted by Damaseb, the interrogator in chief, like this: ‘Welcome, President Blatter.’
Blatter proceeded to give his account of the episode: he recalled he had indeed had a conversation with Warner before the meeting, and he had told Warner he should not organise such a meeting of the CFU, which was not a full meeting of Concacaf.
‘And when he was speaking about the aspect of money,’ Blatter said, ‘I told him again: “Don’t speak about that.”’
This was Blatter’s evidence, that when Warner talked to him about the meeting and said they might give money, Blatter had told him ‘to not speak about the money’.
Clearly relaxed, Blatter argued that he was accused of not having reported a breach of the Fifa ethics code he knew about, but he said he had no knowledge of any such breach, because this was a conversation before a meeting, which he told Warner not to hold. Asked if he wanted to say anything in his defence, Blatter told them it was ‘a sad day to be here’, but he was happy to defend himself. Then he recalled that at the 2006 congress in Munich he himself had had ‘the initiative’ to set up the ethics committee on which they were sitting. At the time, as bin Hammam and his lawyers would point out in their appeal to CAS, the Fifa executive committee, over which Blatter smoothly reigned, appointed the members of the ethics committee and fixed their fees for the work. Irrelevant to the facts of what he knew in advance about the suitcase of cash at the hotel in Trinidad, it seemed to be a little reminder to his inquisitors that they owed their positions, and fees, to him. He promised that he was committed to ‘zero tolerance’, and he thanked them all ‘for your dedication for the good of the game… I congratulate you.’
‘Thank you very much, President Blatter,’ Damaseb replied, before asking Blatter where he would be for them to communicate their decision.
‘I am in my office, I am working,’ Blatter said.
When he received the communication, it was to tell him that he was cleared of any charge, and therefore free to walk through the election to his fourth term as the president.
But although it had all felt at the time, in the heated, claustrophobic, paranoid cocoon in Zurich, like the whole scandal was too good for Blatter to be true, it was all pretty much as stated. Damaseb’s committee’s report, although produced in suspiciously record time, nevertheless recited the key elements of this crude episode, and concluded: ‘It appears rather compelling to consider that the actions of Mr Bin Hammam constitute prima facie an act of bribery, or at least an attempt to commit bribery.’
Of Warner, the committee concluded, the fact that he planned to say the money came from the CFU itself: ‘Makes it seem quite likely that the accused contributed himself to the relevant actions, thereby acting as an accessory to corruption.’
Not holding back on the force with which they were suddenly pursuing out of Fifa bin Hammam and Warner, two long-term fixtures at the heart of the executive committee, the ethics committee commissioned a heavyweight investigator: Louis Freeh, a former director of the FBI and US federal judge. His Freeh Group produced its report on 29 June 2011, with Blatter off on the winds of his new term already. The report concluded, like the ethics committee:
‘There is compelling circumstantial evidence… to suggest that the money did originate with Mr Bin Hammam and was distributed by Mr Warner’s subordinates as a means of demonstrating Mr Warner’s largesse.’
While bin Hammam was at the Baur au Lac touching his hands to his chest, telling us he was heartbroken, and saying no more, Warner was rattling with fury and saying a lot. That first night, he dropped Valcke’s email about Qatar having bought the World Cup, and he was threatening his ‘tsunami’ of revelations from his many years in the executive committee, during which he had been a confirmed ally of Blatter. Then, on 20 June 2011, when he was still provisionally suspended and facing a final hearing, Warner suddenly announced he was resigning from all positions in football, thus putting himself beyond reach of Fifa. Warner, similarly to bin Hammam’s explanation for standing down as a presidential candidate, maintained he was innocent but was resigning to spare Fifa, Concacaf and the CFU ‘further acrimony and divisiveness’.
In his statement, Warner said: ‘I am convinced, and I am advised by counsel, that since my actions did not extend beyond facilitating the meeting that gave Mr Bin Hammam an opportunity to pursue his aborted bid for the Fifa presidency I would be fully exonerated by any objective arbiter.’
He reserved some scorn for Blazer, saying: ‘I have lost my enthusiasm to continue. The secretary general that I had employed, who worked with me for twenty-one years, with the assistance of elements of Fifa has sought to undermine me in ways that are unimaginable.’
Considering that the ethics committee had found compelling evidence that Warner had been an accessory to corruption, and had said corruption ‘affects the very core of sports and is to be considered as nothing less than life-threatening for sports’, Fifa issued a startlingly eulogising statement of farewell to Warner.
‘Fifa regrets the turn of events that have led to Mr Warner’s decision,’ Fifa said in its statement, bewilderingly. ‘Mr Warner is leaving Fifa by his own volition after nearly 30 years of service, having chosen to focus on his important work on behalf of the people and government of Trinidad and Tobago as a cabinet minister and as the chairman of the United National Congress, the major party in his country’s coalition government.
‘The Fifa executive committee, the Fifa president and the Fifa management thank Mr Warner for his services to Caribbean, Concacaf and international football over his many years devoted to football at both regional and international level, and wish him well for the future.’
He could hardly have had a more congratulatory leaving statement if he was retiring at the height of his career. Fifa went out of its way to emphasise he was not guilty of anything, even though he had been suspended.
‘As a consequence of Mr Warner’s self-determined resignation, all ethics committee procedures against him have been closed, and the presumption of innocence is maintained.’
Warner also said, about the cash being handed out to CFU delegates at the meeting, that it was part of the culture of Fifa:
‘It’s not unusual for such things to happen and gifts have been around throughout the history of Fifa,’ Warner said. ‘What’s happening now is for me hypocrisy… This is giving the impression that Fifa is sanitising itself.’
It remains a puzzle, still, why Warner, who pronounced his innocence and all-round rightness with such extreme rhetoric, would suddenly step down without fighting the charges. And why Fifa, with a case against him so blatant and all but proven, would shower him with praise. It would emerge later, from a forensic audit of the AFC’s accounts, that bin Hammam had paid Warner $1.2m for what the two men had said were legal costs–Warner had some trouble persuading any bank to accept the money–but that does not explain it. Some have said that Warner had agreed to calm his ‘tsunami’ and certainly, from that point, his allegations against Blatter and Fifa did abate until the major storm of the indictments blew in.
On 18 August 2011, the Fifa ethics committee announced its final decision on bin Hammam: guilty of breaching the world football governing body’s code on bribery, giving gifts and other offences. After so many years constructing a career and political empire in football, lending support to Blatter in 1998 and 2002 in ways which have still never been fully revealed, Mohamed bin Hammam was banned from football by Blatter’s Fifa, for life. Bin Hammam did not accept that, and he appealed to CAS. Their panel of three senior lawyers, including the noted human rights barrister Philippe Sands QC, were not at all impressed by Fifa’s conduct of the case, nor, in particular, by the total exoneration of Warner. They did not accept that Fifa’s ethics committee should have stopped its investigation into Warner despite his resignation, arguing Fifa ‘disabled itself’ from a thorough examination of what had happened.
Blatter gave evidence to CAS but, the judgement said: ‘Mr Blatter declined to answer its questions concerning the circumstances of Mr Warner’s resignation and the termination of disciplinary proceedings against him, as well as the relationship between these two events.’
CAS did not in fact uphold the life ban on bin Hammam, finding, perhaps surprisingly, that Fifa and its ethics committee had not proved that the cash in the suitcase definitely came from him. Blatter had made contradictory statements: in the first, a written one the day before his tour de force performance at the ethics committee, he had said that Warner did tell him in advance that CFU members would receive money from bin Hammam. But then in the hearing itself, Blatter said: ‘But we didn’t speak about that the [sic] money is coming there–from who the money is coming.’
Angenie Kanhai, the secretary general of the CFU at the time of the scandal, also gave contradictory statements, CAS found. In July 2011, soon after the events, she had given her version in a note to the CFU executive. In that, she said Warner had told her there would be gifts for delegates at the Hyatt, but not that he’d said bin Hammam was the source of the gifts. She made her second statement on 27 February 2012. The CAS proceedings were far advanced by then, with bin Hammam arguing that the Fifa ethics committee had been biased, partly pointing to the fact that its members were appointed by the executive committee, ‘chaired by Mr Blatter, and composed of his close associates, who deal with the compensation of the committee members and its staff’. Bin Hammam was also arguing that he was not the source of the cash in the suitcase at the Hyatt, and that the ethics committee had no definitive proof that he was. Fifa was adamantly defending its ban of bin Hammam and the ethics committee process, and arguing that it had sufficient evidence, including from statements Warner had made, that the money came from bin Hammam, who was the only person with ‘a motive to provide gifts’. At the time Angenie Kanhai made her second statement, Fifa was compiling its response to some of these challenges by bin Hammam. Kanhai, the CAS judgement says, was unemployed at the time–following the scandal, she had resigned as CFU secretary general in December 2011. In this second statement, made two months later, she did tie bin Hammam in as the definitive source of the money, differing from her earlier statement by saying that before the 10 May meeting: ‘Mr Warner told me that the gifts were token gifts from Mr Bin Hammam.’
Two days after making that second statement, the CAS judgement records, Fifa gave Kanhai a job, as a development officer. CAS were not very impressed.
‘It may be that the timing is entirely coincidental,’ the judgement states, ‘but given the significance of the addition to the statement, and her failure to provide a compelling (or any real) explanation for it, the panel is bound to treat the evidence with some degree of caution.’
I asked Angenie Kanhai, via her LinkedIn profile and Fifa’s own press office, for her response to this questioning of her credibility; Fifa replied on behalf of their employee that she did not want to comment, and later she confirmed that herself.
With these flaws in the Fifa process against bin Hammam and its baffling exoneration of Warner after he stepped down, CAS pronounced the case against bin Hammam not proven for an offence so serious as bribery. However, it was an empty victory for bin Hammam in his striving to prove he was actually innocent. The CAS panel were clear that they did believe it was ‘more likely than not that Mr Bin Hammam was the source of the monies that were brought into Trinidad and Tobago and eventually distributed at the meeting by Mr Warner’.
The judgement emphasised that, in applying the law, the panel ‘is not making any sort of affirmative finding of innocence in relation to Mr Bin Hammam… It is a situation of “case not proven,” coupled with concern on the part of the panel that the Fifa investigation was not complete or comprehensive enough to fill the gaps in the record.’
This result of the cash being handed out in brown envelopes at the Hyatt Regency in Trinidad was, on the surface, that bin Hammam’s ban was overturned, but without clearing his reputation of the smell of bribery, and Warner had resigned from football with his record intact despite his central involvement. Blazer was hailed as a man who did the right thing by football. Blatter was in the clear as president. But the respite for all of them was brief. These men were all conducting themselves as if nobody could see into their privileged, luxurious bubble of Fifa politics. But this was, after all, basic and very public corruption, in the US’s backyard, using US currency, which some of the delegates sought clearance to take through US airports–there is a limit of $10,000 by law.
Then, in August 2011, Warner launched another broadside at Blazer, saying in an open letter:
‘I began to be concerned with Blazer several years ago when I became aware of the large sums he was earning in commissions. He refused to respond fully to my questions in regard to them… Up to this point in time [since 2004], neither he nor his company has any valid contract with Concacaf.’
Warner did not seem to realise how damning for him, as well as Blazer, his ranting allegations were, and that serious questions were mounting very publicly indeed now, about the money and running of Concacaf by Warner and Blazer, and of the AFC by bin Hammam. Soon, there would be some very serious people, not just Fifa and its looking-glass world of political manipulators, seeking proper answers.
In Kuala Lumpur, headquarters of the Asian Football Confederation where bin Hammam had been the president for nine years, reformers took the opportunity of his suspension by Fifa to have a look at the books. Led by Prince Ali bin Al Hussein, a member of the royal family in Jordan yet an unlikely battler for openness and democracy in football, the AFC instructed forensic accountants PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) to conduct an examination. Their report was published on 13 July 2012, after CAS had heard all the evidence on the Trinidad shamelessness, and just four days before its panel was due to deliver its ‘most likely guilty, but case not proven’ verdict.
The PWC report itemised multi-millions of dollars being paid, unexplained, into and out of a private account kept for bin Hammam at the AFC. It highlighted $14m paid into that account, for bin Hammam personally, in 2008, and connected that payment to the AFC’s sale of its TV rights, although the report said there was no ‘direct evidence to confirm a link’. Then, listed over nine pages, was $2m of payments going out to individuals and FAs, some unexplained, others with a range of reasons adding up to a strange tombola of apparently random patronage from bin Hammam. The report said that the AFC made these payments on bin Hammam’s personal instruction over several years, with 2008 being the most active year.
One of the direct beneficiaries was Jack Warner himself, in March 2008 $250,000 being sent to a Concacaf account in Trinidad, with a confirmation which noted: ‘payment to Jack A Warner on behalf of AFC president’.
A name from the past, Elias Zaccour, the agent who supported João Havelange’s efforts to win the 1974 election and paid the overdue fees of several African FAs, was handsomely paid by the AFC under bin Hammam thirty-three years later. Described by PWC, based on reports, as ‘a racehorse owner and purported Fifa lobbyist’, Zaccour was paid $139,100 to his account in a Luxembourg bank, described as being ‘on behalf of AFC president’, but with no further explanation PWC could see.
Mostly in 2009 and 2010, bin Hammam had the AFC pay significant amounts to fifteen Asian FAs, largely in poorer countries, stated to be for various football-related needs, including $90,000 to North Korea’s FA to build a pitch for the mini-soccer game, futsal, and for fencing. Bin Hammam was also paying off fines and fees charged by the AFC to some FAs, which the report said ‘appears highly unusual’, and subsidising some countries’ fees to participate in AFC championships. In July 2009, bin Hammam had the AFC pay Fifa just under $8,000 to settle fines imposed against Myong Chol Kim, a coach for the North Korea FA, for offensive behaviour during a match.
‘We do not know why the AFC president would pay a Fifa imposed fine on behalf of the offending party,’ PWC said. ‘This may be seen by some as a clear conflict of interest.’
Bin Hammam was found to have had the AFC pay more than $700,000 in travel and ‘allowances’ for Confederation of African Football delegates to go to Kuala Lumpur on trips in 2008, for which the expenses included ‘city tours, shuttle services, shopping and entertainment within Malaysia’. The AFC also bought a Nissan pickup truck costing $26,820 for the Gambian FA, whose president explained that it was so that talent scouts could get around the country to watch players. It was not explained why the Asian Football Confederation should be making such direct payments to delegates and FAs in Africa.
Some of the payments appeared to amount to personal generosity to people in football, including $20,000 to the secretary general of the Bangladesh FA, who was undergoing treatment for cancer, and paying the hospital bills for the president of the Philippines FA.
In amongst it all was some largesse to Sepp Blatter, too, in February 2008: $1,983 spent by the AFC, on bin Hammam’s instruction, on fourteen shirts made for the Fifa president by the Lord’s Tailor, apparently a renowned and expensive outfitters in Kuala Lumpur. In September 2008 Issa Hayatou, the president of CAF, was bestowed a similar gift: suits, from the Lord’s Tailor, costing $4,950, paid for by bin Hammam’s AFC. There were gifts for Warner, too, a Canon camera costing $490, and a Samsonite, presumably a suitcase, costing $367 from a department store in Malaysia.
Bin Hammam also put his own personal and family expenses through the AFC books, including having cash advances of $1m between 2002 and 2011, for which he gave no reason or receipt, the report said. There were hotels, meals, a car was bought for $12,840 in October 2010–‘the recipient of this car was not stated’–$232,370 for three privately chartered flights; many payments to the Lord’s Tailor to buy suits for bin Hammam; cosmetic dentistry for his daughter ($4,748); evening dresses; $100,000 to bin Hammam’s wife, Naheed Rabaiah, with no reason given; and $2,114 for bin Hammam’s son’s honeymoon.
The forensic accountants’ advice to the AFC was that the vast money paid in for bin Hammam’s personal benefit looked ‘highly unusual’, and ‘there does not appear to be any rationale or AFC business purpose’ to the pack of payments made on his behalf to FAs and individuals. The conclusion of this investigation, after all the effort bin Hammam had put in to be exonerated over the Trinidad cash, was distinctly damaging:
‘In view of the recent allegations that have surrounded Mr Hammam [sic],’ PWC wrote, ‘it is our view that there is significant risk that:
The AFC may have been used as a vehicle to launder funds and that the funds have been credited to the former president for an improper purpose (Money Laundering risk),
The AFC may have been used as a vehicle to launder the receipt and payment of bribes.’
Of the array of payments and mingling of his own private life with that of the football confederation, the report said: ‘There remains a risk that potentially inappropriate expenditure has been incurred by the AFC in relation to the President, his family, friends, business contacts and other third party individuals such as member associations and related individuals.’
PWC also believed the AFC might even have breached international sanctions, by making dollar payments to people and the FAs in Iran and North Korea, which were subject to sanctions regimes.
The journalist James M. Dorsey, who covered the PWC investigation in regular blogs and in his book The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer, reported that bin Hammam did instruct accountants of his own in an effort to justify all expenditure set out in the PWC report. Bin Hammam denied wrongdoing and there are not understood to have been any criminal or other legal proceedings based on the report. However, while CAS said the report had come too late to be taken into account for its judgement into the Trinidad payments, and anyway was not directly relevant, Fifa’s ethics committee seized on it. On 17 December 2012 bin Hammam, who two years earlier had basked in the triumph of his country, Qatar, being awarded the 2022 World Cup, then mounted a challenge to Blatter for the Fifa presidency, resigned from all his roles in football and committed never to be active in football again. But additions to the ethics committee’s powers had given it the authority to still discipline individuals even after they have resigned and so it banned bin Hammam for life from football anyway.
The announcement of their decision stated that bin Hammam’s ban was for ‘repeated violations’ of the rules against having conflicts of interest, while bin Hammam had been AFC president and a member of the Fifa executive committee, in the years from 2008 to 2011, ‘which justified a lifelong ban from all football related activity’.
From the refusal of some honest people not to take what was alleged to be bin Hammam’s money, offered in brown envelopes in a Trinidad hotel in an almost ostentatiously public procession, light was being shone for the first time into the fiefdoms of Fifa. And some long-time chiefs, former supporters and allies of Sepp Blatter, were beginning to fall, very hard indeed.