Two figures sat hunched forward in the wan glow of their computer screens, their faces furrowed in concentration. Only the pale shafts of spring sunlight slanting through chinks in the blinds penetrated the gloom. This anonymous attic room above a boarded-up high-street shop was the perfect hide-out. No one would think to look here, in this obscure little northern suburb that could have been anywhere. The two figures were Jonathan Calvert and Heidi Blake – together, The Sunday Times Insight team – and this attic room was the nerve-centre of their investigation into Mohamed bin Hammam’s corrupt World Cup campaign.
Through draughty windows which never quite closed came the comfortable chatter of the blue-rinse brigade of elderly ladies who congregated each morning outside the café across the road. The only sound within emanated from giant computer servers whirring away endlessly in the corner as they churned through tens of thousands of terrabytes of data. It was March 2014, and Calvert and Blake had been camped out in the attic for two weeks already. They were here to trawl through many millions of highly sensitive documents held by a whistleblower from inside FIFA who wanted to lift the lid on corruption in the bidding process for the 2018 and 2022 World Cups. The source was rightly cautious: he had been introduced to the journalists by a mutual acquaintance at a London hotel just a month before, and he didn’t trust strangers easily. He wasn’t prepared to allow them to access his documents from anywhere other than this secure room, where their activities were monitored by two CCTV cameras mounted on the wall. The documents were to remain on computers controlled by the source and were not to be sent electronically outside of the room until the work was finished.
The deal was clear-cut: Calvert and Blake would spend three months working on the story in secret and they would do justice to the material by publishing a full and detailed account of the investigation in The Sunday Times at the end. The source’s identity would be protected, and any documents the journalists published on the newspaper’s website with his agreement at the end of their work would be redacted and stripped of identifying metadata. If any material leaked before that, if their whereabouts became known or if the source’s identity was blown, then the deal was off.
The stakes were high. So the journalists could not tell anyone other than their senior editors and the newspaper’s lawyers where they were, or what they were doing. Their families and friends were, for the most part, kept in the dark. Blake and Calvert simply disappeared one morning, and their colleagues at The Sunday Times had no idea where they had gone. In their absence, rumours began to circulate back in London that the Insight team had been disbanded. The journalists received concerned phone calls and emails from their fellow reporters, and media bloggers began to get in touch to try to find out what had become of them. But their lips had to stay sealed.
It was wearying work, sitting for the most part in silence with their backs turned to each other, their eyes glued to screens in opposite corners of the room, scouring their secret haul for the single explosive element which would blow the whole story wide open. There were hundreds of millions of documents from inside Bin Hammam’s private office in Doha, the headquarters of the Asian Football Confederation in Kuala Lumpur, the offices of the official Qatar World Cup bid and FIFA itself.
It was a physical impossibility to read them all, so the pair had hired a technical expert to set them up with forensic technology which allowed them to run smart searches across the vast database. They could now narrow down the millions of documents by searching multiple combinations of key names and phrases, filtering the results by variables like date-range, author or the location where the document was created. When they found relevant material, they could apply tags to cluster it together so they could navigate back to it quickly. The cache contained emails, faxes, accounts, bank records, telephone logs, letters, electronic messages, minutes of meetings, confidential reports, flight manifests, travel bookings and more. It was a data leak on an astonishing scale. For FIFA and the Qatar World Cup bid, this was nothing short of a catastrophe.
So far, the reporters had read thousands of documents, many of which set their journalistic antennae wagging. Qatar had always claimed Bin Hammam had played no part in its successful World Cup campaign, but there was plenty of evidence here that his role had really been crucial, as the source suspected. There was proof of secret meetings between Bin Hammam and members of the FIFA executive committee at which the voters were showered with lavish hospitality as the World Cup bid was discussed. There were emails from shadowy fixers hinting at dubious back-room deals, and flight records showing Bin Hammam had flown voters across the world on his private jet to meet the Emir. But still the reporters had not yet found the smoking gun they were looking for: the document that proved corruption beyond doubt. Until now.
Calvert was frowning and leaning closer to his screen.
‘Huh,’ he said. Blake spun round.
‘What have you found?’ The pair had worked together closely for several years, and they knew each other inside out. Calvert had a cool head and there wasn’t much he hadn’t seen before. Blake was more readily excited by the first glimpse of a breakthrough. She had learned to read her colleague’s reactions, and when Calvert said ‘Huh,’ she knew he had struck upon something worth hearing about. She scooted across the room on her swivel chair. Calvert was staring at a grainy facsimile of a blue bank transfer slip, dated 18 June 2009. The slip showed that $10,000 had been paid into the personal account of a Mr Seedy MB Kinteh at Standard Chartered Bank, Serrekunda Branch, Gambia. The money had come from the account of an Aisha Mohd Al Abdullah at Doha Bank, Al Handasa Branch.
‘Aisha is Bin Hammam’s daughter,’ said Blake. ‘She’s come up in the documents before. But who’s that she’s paying?’
‘Seedy Kinteh is the president of the Gambian FA,’ said Calvert. ‘Or at least he was. I’ve just Googled him. He was banned from football last year over financial irregularities in the federation.’ They looked at each other. Blake was grinning.
‘A corrupt official called Seedy! This is basically the high point of my career so far,’ she laughed. ‘But seriously, what is Bin Hammam’s daughter doing paying this guy ten grand the year before the World Cup vote? What possible innocent explanation is there?’
‘God knows,’ murmured Calvert. ‘But I wonder if there are more of these.’
The transfer slip was attached to an email that had been sent to Bin Hammam’s closest aide, Najeeb Chirakal, by accounts staff at his construction company, Kemco, after the money was paid to Kinteh. The reporters quickly discovered that Aisha’s account was administered by staff at Kemco to make dozens of payments like this one. In fact, it was one of ten slush funds, including Bin Hammam’s own account, which the Kemco clerks used to funnel cash to football officials at Chirakal’s instruction.
The reporters found that if they ran searches for the standard Kemco email address, they hit a rich seam of emails just like this, with the grainy blue bank transfer slips attached. Over the next few days, they gathered evidence of scores of payments that Bin Hammam’s staff at Kemco had made to the heads of football associations across Africa and Asia in the two years before and straight after the World Cup vote. They began compiling spreadsheets of the transactions, noting down the amounts, dates and account details and the content of the emails accompanying the transfer slips. They added each of the payments to a timeline they were building of Bin Hammam’s activities, which began to reveal a clear picture of the Qatari’s campaign to build up a groundswell of support among football officials across the continents of Africa and Asia.
It was evident that the bulk of the African payments coalesced around a series of junkets which were hosted by Bin Hammam in Kuala Lumpur and later Doha. Days after they discovered the first Kemco payment slip, Blake uncovered AFC accounts documents which revealed how his bagman Mohammed Meshadi had withdrawn hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash to provide handouts to the visitors in Kuala Lumpur in June and October 2008. By the end of the week there was no doubting Bin Hammam’s corrupt activity. In the two years leading up to the World Cup vote, he had paid more than $5 million to the leaders of 30 football federations across Africa in cash handouts and transfers of as much as $200,000 from the slush funds operated by his staff at Kemco.
But the reporters were far from finished. Next, they wanted to know whether the officials appointed to head Qatar’s World Cup bid committee could be connected to the junkets at which Bin Hammam bought the support of his African brothers.