The classy district of Ikoya, with its bustling designer shops and cocktail nightlife, is the most affluent area of Lagos, Nigeria’s most populous city. It is crammed with high-rise buildings and luxury apartments with starting prices of $1 million, affordable only to the country’s ruling elite or oil industry expatriates on expenses. Ikoya is Africa’s most expensive patch of real estate. Within its boundaries is the more sedate and extremely exclusive Park View Estate, with easy access to the golf course and country club that serve as a reminder of the city’s colonial past. This was the second home of Amos Adamu, the Nigerian FIFA executive committee member, when he wasn’t in the capital, Abuja. His wasn’t just an apartment in Park View – he had a mansion built in the style of a Spanish villa with pink roof tiles and white-rendered walls, standing in one acre of gardens. And, as if all this wasn’t enough of a symbol of wealth and status, the villa’s address left no doubt about the eminence of its main resident: Number One, Dr Amos Adamu Close.
The Adamu clan had barely enough time to unpack their suitcases from the trip to Angola before an email popped up in Samson’s inbox. It was from Ali Al-Thawadi, the man in the robe Samson had met in Luanda, using his official Qatar 2022 email address. ‘It was a great pleasure meeting you and I hope you had a safe journey home,’ fawned the campaign’s deputy chief. ‘I would like to congratulate you on the fantastic event held by CAF, which I thoroughly enjoyed.’ That was generous of Al-Thawadi, given that his own bid had paid for the whole shebang, to the tune of $1.8 million. Next, he cut short the pleasantries and got down to business. ‘Can you provide me with the full name and address of your personal company in order for me to get the contract and scope of work prepared between the two parties. I look forward to hearing from you as soon as possible.’ Al-Thawadi had been as good as his word. One million dollars was coming Samson’s way.
Samson acted quickly on his side of the bargain. He did not want such a large amount of cash to be paid through his Nigerian company, which was registered at his father’s other home in the capital, Abuja. So he got on the phone to Daniel Magerle, a partner at the law firm of Magerle Jenal Stieger in the medieval Swiss city of Winterthur, and asked him to set up a company there. The fledgling entrepreneur may have been an ingénu in the world of business, but he was smart enough to know that a wire transaction to Switzerland might get less clogged up with red tape than if it went directly to his own country. International transfers of that size to Nigeria tended to set alarm bells ringing in banks’ anti-money-laundering divisions. Samson had just returned from Switzerland with his FIFA masters degree, and he trusted the Swiss to handle his big payday with their usual discretion.
Magerle took up the negotiations with Ali Al-Thawadi the following day. ‘Dear Sir, I am contacting you on behalf of Samson Adamu,’ he wrote in an email. ‘I am representing and legally advising Samson and the association regarding the African Legend [sic] dinner. On behalf of Mr Adamu, I inform you that the name of the association is “Kinetic Sports Association”, an association under Swiss law.’
The Qatar bid was eager to get on with the deal. Within days, a contract had been drawn up by their lawyer, Romi Nayef, and sent to Samson on 10 February 2010. Entitled ‘Legends of African Football – Gala Dinner – Sponsorship’, it set out Qatar’s offer of ‘One Million United States Dollars’ for the sponsorship rights for the dinner, which was to be held in Johannesburg on 10 June 2010 along with a three-day workshop for African journalists earlier the same month. The agreement was to be made between the newly created Kinetic Sports Association in Switzerland and a ‘private institution’ in Qatar ‘which is bidding to host the 2022 FIFA World Cup . . . and wishes to acquire certain exclusive rights in connection with the events in order to promote its bid to host the competition’. The bid team was clearly unrepentant about locking out their rivals in Angola: all the other ‘competitor associations’ were to be banned from marketing at the dinner under the contract.
The signatories on behalf of the bid committee were Hassan Al-Thawadi, its sharp chief executive, and its chairman Sheikh Mohammed, the son of the Emir. This was a dangerous move by the young leaders of Qatar’s official bid. Samson was the son of one of the 24 FIFA voters they were trying to influence, and he stood to make a gigantic profit on this deal. The costings for the event, when they were eventually calculated, added up to no more than $220,000, but he was going to be paid $1 million. FIFA’s rules forbade bidding countries from offering the voters or their relatives ‘any monetary gift’ or ‘any kind of personal advantage that could give even the impression of exerting influence, or conflict of interest, whether directly or indirectly, in connection with the bidding process’. But Samson was going to walk away from his deal with Qatar with a cool profit of $780,000, just for organising a dinner. It was a breach of the rules on a massive scale, and the official Qatar bid team had always been so careful to keep their hands clean until now. What possessed Sheikh Mohammed and Al-Thawadi to put their names to such a contract? Had their success in Luanda gone to their heads?
Samson’s next step was to get the elders of African football onside. He flew to Lubumbashi, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, on 20 February to present his vision for the gala dinner celebrating the continent’s football legends to the Confederation of African Football executive committee who were meeting that day. In an email to Ali Al-Thawadi two days later, he enthused that the members had assured him of their ‘total support and willingness to grace the occasion’. He went on: ‘CAF’s support is good in that it adds more credibility and prestige to our event.’
Back in Switzerland, his lawyer was compiling the paperwork for Samson’s new association and arranging a bank account to receive the payment. ‘The relationship to Switzerland would probably add a lot of additional credibility to the project,’ Magerle assured his client. Then the lawyer encountered a snag. UBS had refused to open an account for the new association, he explained to Samson, because: ‘Swiss banks are very sensitive these days and international pressure has increased on certain matters. I had to mention the nationalities of the persons involved. Nigeria is on the list of sensitive countries I am afraid. I would have to provide a whole list of documents and declarations to open the account.’ It was just as Samson had feared, but the canny Magerle quickly found a solution. He could ask Qatar to pay the cash into the client account of his own law firm.
A meeting was arranged with Ali Al-Thawadi and a delegation from the Qatar bid at the five-star Intercontinental Hotel in London on Thursday 4 March. Samson would take his lawyer, and the deal would be sealed.
For Bin Hammam, Angola had been a great success. His groundwork over the past 18 months had paid off handsomely and he was encouraged by the messages of support for the Qatar bid which flooded into his inbox from his African brothers and sisters. There were still ten critical months to go before the secret ballot which would decide the hosts of the 2018 and 2022 tournaments, and his job was far from complete. It was time to step up his charm offensive a gear with the executive committee members whose votes he needed to win.
His private jet would be invaluable over the next few months. From Angola, Bin Hammam jetted in to Zurich to attend a finance committee meeting, sending FIFA a $16,342 bill for his expenses on the visit. Then he was back on the plane again the next day for lunch with Michel Platini at UEFA’s modern university campus-style headquarters in Nyon, France on 3 February. The UEFA president’s staff had scheduled a group lunch, but Bin Hammam insisted on a private session with Platini. Even his trusted bagman Mohammed Meshadi was left outside as the two grandees sauntered into a small corporate dining room, where the food was the nearest thing to Michelin-standard that a staff canteen can be. It took just a little over an hour for Bin Hammam to make his compelling pitch for Qatar to host the World Cup, and impress on Platini that the Gulf state and his home country, France, could enjoy excellent relations. The two men gave each other a comradely hug, then Bin Hammam was back in his car heading for the airport.
He was in a hurry because he had another important dinner lined up that evening back in Zurich at 7pm sharp. A giant Mercedes eased to a halt outside the foyer of the Baur au Lac Hotel and out stepped a man who looked as if he owned the place. It was Fedor Radmann, the debonair lobbyist who had accompanied the executive committee voter Franz Beckenbauer to Doha for the meeting with the Emir the previous October. Radmann had the appearance of a minor European royal straight off the yacht. His white hair was carefully coiffed, and a pink silk handkerchief flopped out of the breast pocket of an elegantly tailored dark suit that neatly disguised the expanding girth of a man in his late middle age. He paused briefly to exchange pleasantries with the concierge before heading off to the place where he did much of his business: the Pavillon restaurant in FIFA’s favourite hotel.
There, among the ever so delicately arranged sprays of out-of-season lilies and purple orchids, was his old friend Mohamed, looking equally urbane in his figure-hugging black Nehru jacket as he sipped his sparkling mineral water. The two men had a lot to talk about and they got straight down to it after Radmann summoned the waiter and ordered himself an aperitif. Radmann was, of course, working for the Australians along with Andreas Abold and Bin Hammam’s old friend Peter Hargitay, so there was always the chance of picking up intelligence on what Qatar’s rivals were up to. More importantly, Bin Hammam wanted to keep reminding Radmann and Beckenbauer of their debt his country, which had done so much to help Germany win the contest to host the 2006 World Cup. When, as Bin Hammam anticipated, the Australian bid was eliminated in the early rounds of the 2022 ballot, he expected Beckenbauer to vote for Qatar.
The billionaire couldn’t linger in Zurich: he had to rush back to Doha to greet another very important guest. He was hosting Reynald Temarii, the executive committee voter from Tahiti, and he intended to make sure he was given the best in Arabian hospitality. Temarii was travelling with the secretary general of his Oceania confederation, Tai Nicholas, but he had a lunch scheduled with just himself, Bin Hammam and members of the Qatar 2022 bid. He also insisted that he should have some further private time with his Exco colleague.
These were encouraging signs. Temarii had publicly pledged his vote to Australia during the World Cup draw in Cape Town the previous December, but just like Beckenbauer there was every reason to target his vote in the later rounds, assuming the Australians crashed out early. So Bin Hammam gave Temarii the full royal blue carpet treatment. The Oceania voter was chauffeured to the striking white Diwan Palace overlooking the West Bay to see the Emir on 9 February. As was customary, Bin Hammam sought a corner of the vast state reception room and stood with his head bowed while Temarii was presented to His Highness. Humbled by the experience, the Pacific islander wished the bid well. Another good sign.
Bin Hammam had to keep moving. Two days later, he was climbing the steps of his jet again. His first stop-off was Bangkok where he and Meshadi were welcomed by their friend and fellow intriguer Worawi Makudi, the FIFA Exco member from Thailand. Makudi was Bin Hammam’s long-time ally in FIFA and it was natural that the squat Thai colleague was a fully signed-up supporter of the Qatar 2022 bid. Bin Hammam touched down in Bangkok to scoop up Makudi and then it was up in the air again, bound this time for the most heavily populated city in the world: Tokyo. There the two men renewed their acquaintance with Junji Ogura, Japan’s respectfully quiet and gentle executive committee member. The entire official Qatar bid committee were also in town for the East Asian Championship. It was another chance to promote their campaign and appeal to Asia’s four voters.
Still the punishing schedule did not let up. Soon Bin Hammam was once again burning aviation fuel as he sped to the South Korean capital, Seoul, where he, Makudi and Meshadi met one of the city’s richest residents, Dr Chung Mong-joon, the final member of the Asian Exco quartet. That night they all dined in style in a revolving restaurant at the top of the landmark Seoul Tower, perched on Mount Namsan. The next day, Chung took Bin Hammam to meet the country’s premier, Lee Myung-bak, at the Blue House, an imposing presidential pavilion with a traditional Korean blue-tiled roof in the shadow of Bugaksan mountain. After his meeting with the president, Bin Hammam published a blog post on the Asian Football Confederation website extolling the unifying potential of the South Korean bid. ‘What impressed me during the meeting was the Korean President’s vision for football and his noble dream that it would bring peace to the two Koreas. No wonder, Korea’s bid for the 2022 FIFA World Cup has his full and unqualified support,’ he said.
The dinner with Chung was ahead of the two-day AFC congress, which was being held in Seoul that year. All four Asian bids were in the room, and it was important that Bin Hammam kept everyone happy. At a congress press conference on 17 February, he issued a rallying cry to FIFA, in his capacity as AFC president, to award the rights to host the 2022 World Cup to one of the bidding countries from Asia. He took the opportunity to speak publicly for the first time about his own country’s bid, telling journalists: ‘There are so many advantages if Qatar gets to host the World Cup . . . All the group matches can be played in venues which are within reasonable distance of each other . . . Secondly, Qatar will be representing the wishes and hopes of the Middle East.’ With Ogura at his side during the speech, and Chung watching in the wings, he still had to maintain the appearance that the AFC president was neutral, so he was diplomatic: praising Qatar’s rivals just as warmly. He would be equally happy if Japan or South Korea won, he fibbed. They had wonderful bids. Bin Hammam didn’t have much to say about the Australian contenders, but then they didn’t having a representative on the executive committee whose votes he wanted to win. His message, though, was clear. What he really wanted as AFC president was to see the World Cup come to Asia. It didn’t matter where.
It was his next move that came as the really big surprise. Bin Hammam told the delegates that ‘the time has come’ for Asia to put up a candidate to challenge Sepp Blatter in the next FIFA presidential election. ‘We would like to see an Asian as the president of FIFA,’ he told the news conference. ‘I believe that the time has come for an Asian to come forward for this position. And there is more than one potential candidate available from Asia to lead world football. When we have that person, I hope the whole of Asia will unite behind him.’ The media seized on his words and widely speculated that Bin Hammam himself was preparing to enter the presidential race in the election the following year, though he played down that suggestion. All he wanted was to see an Asian at the top of FIFA, and he would swing his support behind any candidate from the region, he insisted.
The AFC president then did something even more overtly seditious. He told the Guardian newspaper that he and ‘colleagues’ on the executive committee planned to call for FIFA presidents to be restricted to serving two terms, just as Blatter had promised him back in 2002. This looked like a clear attack on the FIFA president as he neared the end of his third term. It wouldn’t cut off Blatter’s legs in the next election, because Bin Hammam’s proposal would come into force later, but it was a clear statement about his suitability to rule over world football indefinitely. The president was quick to hit back. He called an impromptu press conference in Zurich to declare his determination to secure a fourth term. ‘Now it is obvious there will be candidates for the FIFA presidency in 2011 – a candidate from Asia,’ he said. ‘I have not changed my position. I am still here, and I hope to still be here in 2011. I have not now finished my mission, and if the Congress will decide so, I will be at their disposal.’
Such a public spat with the FIFA president less than a year before the World Cup vote looked like a kamikaze move, and the lobbyists backing Qatar’s rivals sniggered behind their hands. Bin Hammam had really overreached himself now. Blatter would be furious. The truth was that Bin Hammam wasn’t so sure he could count on Blatter any more, and this was a good way of hedging his bets. Relations between the two men had been strained in recent months, and they had clashed at the previous meeting of the FIFA executive committee on South Africa’s Robben Island. Blatter’s support for Qatar seemed to be wavering, and the word was out that the decade-old alliance between Bin Hammam and the FIFA president was beginning to crumble. So Bin Hammam had to do something bold to turn things around.
Issuing such threats to Blatter’s presidency from within his Asian power-base had two virtues. First, it addressed Bin Hammam’s top priority of the moment: shoring up regional loyalties, which he hoped would ensure that Ogura and Chung transferred their votes to Qatar once the Japanese and South Korean bids crashed out in the early rounds of voting, as he intended they should. The gentle-spirited Ogura was easily pliable, but Chung was a tougher nut to crack. He and Bin Hammam had a long history as sworn adversaries which needed to be remedied. The AFC president’s carefully worded statements in Seoul were the start of an ingenious strategy he had devised to win the South Korean’s loyalty. Chung had his own well-known designs on the FIFA presidency, and this threat to mount an Asian candidate to topple Blatter was a sop to him. The assault on presidential term limits had been devised during private talks between the two men ahead of the AFC congress, and the plot continued by email in the months that followed.
The second virtue of Bin Hammam’s show of muscle in Seoul was its potential to make Blatter rethink his recent frosty treatment of the Qataris. When it came to it, he believed all the FIFA president really cared about was clinging on to power, so if Bin Hammam had any leverage over the old campaigner it was the threat of toppling him from his gilded perch. If Blatter was backed into a corner, he could go one of two ways. He could either try to undermine his rival by destroying Qatar’s bid, or he could attempt to ward off a presidential coup by backing the Gulf state in order to regain Bin Hammam’s loyalty. The public challenge the Qatari had issued in Seoul was a gamble. Would it pay off?
You didn’t mess with a man like Sepp Blatter and get away unscathed. A week after Bin Hammam threw down the gauntlet in Seoul, he received a nasty surprise. A round-robin email arrived from the president, casually informing members of the Exco that FIFA was saddling up a new ethics committee to police the bidding race for the 2018 and 2022 World Cups. Qatar’s $1.8 million payment to sponsor the CAF congress had stirred up a hornet’s nest of tensions between the rival bidders, and by February 2010 the tumult had still not died down. Rumours were swirling – no doubt fomented by Qatar’s opponents – that other payments had been made directly to football officials.
Blatter’s email announced that FIFA had finally appointed a new chairman of its ethics committee, filling a position that had been vacant since the departure the previous year of the last incumbent, Lord Coe, to head the organising committee of the London Olympics. The ethics body had been rudderless when the first complaints about the Angola congress sponsorship had been made to FIFA in January, but now something had spurred Blatter into action. The new chairman was Claudio Sulser, a 54-year-old former international football player turned lawyer, part of the Swiss clique that Blatter felt he could rely on. The president wrote: ‘It is high time that the Ethics Committee took up its duties once again. Therefore, I would like to convene a meeting of the committee to address, in particular, the important matter of the bidding procedure for the 2018/2022 FIFA World Cups.’
Why was Blatter doing this? What could be gained from airing such dirty linen? Bin Hammam looked at the letter again. Did the ethics committee really have jurisdiction over the bids for the World Cup? It certainly never had before, but it was a relatively new body and the scope of its powers had yet to be tested. He was not going to take this without a fight. So he instructed Chirakal to send the letter on to the AFC’s lawyers for a legal opinion. ‘President referring the attached letter to you and would like you to verify if Ethics Committee is appropriate body to address the World Cup Bidding procedure,’ Chirakal wrote in an email to Nguyen thi My Dung in the legal department. Nguyen’s response confirmed Bin Hammam’s fears. The ethics committee only acted in cases of misconduct or undignified behaviour by officials, which included ‘discrimination, ineligibility to be official, conflict of interests, confidentiality, accepting gifts, bribery’. Bin Hammam could see this was a dark cloud on the horizon and Blatter had to be squared off.
Bin Hammam had always had mixed feelings about the FIFA ethics committee. World football’s governing body had first introduced an ethics code in 2004 and then, at a meeting in Munich on the eve of the German World Cup two years later, congress had accepted the formation of a committee to enforce the new rules. It had been a laughably toothless body, as Bin Hammam knew full well: he had been one of its initial members. It had no investigative powers and was limited to reviewing the evidence put before it in the form of a written complaint.
Its first and only high-profile case had been four years earlier against Jack Warner, the notoriously rapacious Trinidad and Tobago executive committee member. Warner was alleged to have sold tickets for the German World Cup on the black market through one of his own businesses, Simpaul Travel, when they should have been distributed among members of the Caribbean football associations.
At a meeting to assess the case in Zurich, Bin Hammam was one of the ethics committee members who expressed disapproval of Warner’s activities. ‘What was unethical about the matter was that the company belonged to Mr Warner. As a FIFA vice-president, he should not be selling tickets for the World Cup,’ Bin Hammam told the committee. Warner was found to have committed three ethics breaches, including a failure to declare his interest in Simpaul. Infractions of that sort were deemed so serious that the penalty stipulated by the code was ‘eligibility for . . . removal from office’. But when the ethics committee’s report on the case went to the Exco, they couldn’t quite bring themselves to kick out one of their own. Instead, Warner’s company was meekly requested to donate $1 million to charity. It was never clear whether it did so, and Warner kept his position.
However, Bin Hammam could see that the newly configured ethics committee might soon have teeth. FIFA had just appointed an investigator for the first time, as its ‘security chief’. He was from the world outside complaisant Switzerland, where crimes like bribery were punishable by imprisonment. Chris Eaton cut an incongruous figure in jeans and cowboy boots as he strolled into the smoked-glass corridors of FIFA’s Zurich headquarters to start his new job in April 2010. A balding 58-year-old Australian, with a greying handlebar moustache, Eaton seemed to be a genuine crime-fighter. He had been head-hunted from Interpol to improve FIFA’s reputation by cleaning up international football and the federation’s executives had great expectations of their new man. If the sleepy ethics committee – staffed by elderly judges and football administrators – was not fit for purpose in the modern era of global sport, Eaton had decades of domestic and international policing experience. Here was someone who could lead serious investigations into corrupt officials and match-fixers, and supply the ethics committee with hard evidence on which to act.
The chance to work at FIFA was a golden opportunity for the investigator who started his career as a police constable in the Melbourne seaside suburb of St Kilda. He had risen up the ranks as an agent in the Australian federal police, and served two stints as the national secretary of his country’s police federation, before joining Interpol at its headquarters in Lyon, France. FIFA was offering him the chance to earn some serious money for the first time in his career. He told friends it was a ‘very well-paid’ job which would allow him to buy a new home for his retirement in seven years’ time.
He had been recruited by Jérôme Valcke, the FIFA secretary general, on the recommendation of their mutual friend Louis Freeh, the former FBI director who ran the Washington-based private investigations company Freeh Group. Eaton had been promised a budget and a team to run proactive investigations. In an email he described his new job as advising Valcke and FIFA on ‘issues impacting or potentially impacting on the World Cup and related events and in protecting the reputation of FIFA with respect to allegations of malpractice’. Bin Hammam did not like the way things were going.
The new ethics committee first meeting was scheduled for 15 March, but Bin Hammam had no time to waste worrying. He was notching up the air miles again that day, this time to Belgium, with Meshadi and his ever-loyal AFC office director Jenny Be in tow. It was a chance to meet up and discuss tactics with the executive committee voter Michel D’Hooghe in the more convivial surroundings of his home country, and further the entente with the Low Countries bid which had developed following Diallo’s visit two months before.
The Belgians pulled out all the stops for Bin Hammam and his entourage in the manner he had so often done for his Exco colleagues. Accompanied by D’Hooghe and several members of the Netherlands–Belgium bid, he was driven through Brussels to meet the Prime Minister Yves Leterme and then given a tour of the Palais de la Nation, the home of the Belgian parliament. He was then taken north of the city to the Chateau de Laeken, following in the footsteps of Napoleon as he crossed the threshold of the royal palace. Dressed in a sleek black suit and shirt with an orange silk tie, Bin Hammam was introduced to His Majesty the King Albert II of the Belgians, who was keen to impress on his guests the readiness of his people to host a World Cup. While very honoured to be in such exalted company, Bin Hammam was equally pleased to have successfully cemented a strong relationship with one of the other bidding countries. Afterwards, his hosts sent him a framed picture of his audience with the King to add to the impressive wall of celebrity photographs in the hall of his Doha home.
In return, Bin Hammam invited the leaders of the Dutch–Belgian bid to the draw for the 2011 Asian Cup in Doha on 23 April. The event was turning into a great opportunity to showcase his country’s World Cup credentials. He had already sent out an invitation to another bid team he was cultivating: the Russians. Alexei Sorokin, the bid chief executive, and Vyacheslav Koloskov, their former executive committee member, were flown in to the Gulf state on a private jet for a five-day visit. Alas, the new Exco member and bid chairman Vitaly Mutko was unavailable to travel, but his underlings sent him a rapturous report of the hospitality they had received. The Qatar Football Association which was officially in charge of the country’s bid was offering all-expenses-paid trips to the event for some of Bin Hammam’s African friends, such as Fadoul Hussein of Djibouti and Said Mahmud Nur of Somalia.
The Qatar FA was also generously picking up the flight, hotel and meal bills for another key Exco voter, Hany Abo Rida. The Egyptian had fast become a close ally of Bin Hammam’s since his election to football’s ruling committee in 2009. Abo Rida had the appearance of a minor North African dictator in his light suits, outsized black shades and close-cropped hair. Having risen from relative obscurity in Egyptian football, his new power at FIFA had made him useful to the ruler of his country, the bloodthirsty President Hosni Mubarak, and Abo Rida was enjoying increased status at home. Football had that kind of exalting effect. The shrewd Egyptian could see that Bin Hammam was a powerful man to cosy up to, and he had given his new ally a cast-iron assurance of his vote for Qatar in the secret World Cup ballot that December. So he received a particularly warm welcome when he touched down in Doha that April.
The most special guest of all at the Asian Cup draw had received his invitation directly from the Diwan Palace and would be spending several days in Doha. Bin Hammam was notified the week before Sepp Blatter’s arrival in a short letter which read: ‘Dear President, I am very pleased to inform you that I will pay a courtesy visit to the Qatar Football Association and the Amir of Qatar’s family next Tuesday, 20 April 2010 . . . Looking forward to seeing you soon.’ Bin Hammam knew that the old fox could never resist a request from the Emir, and this was the chance to rebuild bridges. He instructed Chirakal to make arrangements to receive Blatter and make sure he had the best room in the Sheraton Hotel. Bin Hammam himself went to the airport to meet the FIFA president off his private jet, and the pair were photographed together on the airstrip. Relations between the two men had become increasingly fraught since that dinner with the Emir two years earlier, when Blatter had suggested the World Cup should come to Qatar, and Bin Hammam wanted to know where he stood now. This was an opportunity to test the president’s shifting allegiances.
The immediate crisis dissipated just as the dust whipped up in a sandstorm falls to earth when the wind subsides. Blatter was once again his disarming charming self – impeccably polite to his hosts. Bin Hammam did not mince his words during his talks with Blatter, and the FIFA president would later describe his Qatari friend as having been ‘aggressive’ during their encounters. But his candour had the desired effect, as did the gracious hospitality from the Emir. At the end of his visit, the FIFA president was a fully signed-up supporter of Qatar’s World Cup dream once more. And he didn’t just give pat reassurances in private: he decided to go on record and tell the globe how wonderful it would be to see the tournament take place in the desert country.
At a news conference in Doha, flanked by the president of the Qatar FA, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa bin Ahmed Al Thani, he declared: ‘The Arab world deserves to host the World Cup. We are now nearing the end of the bidding process for the World Cups in 2018 and 2022 and Qatar is the only country bidding from the Middle East. I was an advocate of the FIFA rotation policy. It was important to bring the World Cup to North America and Africa. Now I strongly feel that the World Cup should come to Qatar. I’m a regular visitor to Qatar and every time I land there, I am impressed by all the development.’ The FIFA president said he was certain that Qatar had the organisational abilities to host the tournament and dismissed suggestions that the country’s low ranking in world football would have any bearing on its bid. ‘What matters are the guarantees the bidding country has to offer and on that count I have no doubt that Qatar will put on the table all that is needed to host the event,’ he enthused.
It was exactly what Bin Hammam and the Emir wanted to hear, but Blatter’s pronouncement caused consternation among the other countries bidding for the 2022 tournament. The Australian press reported that the A$43 million their own bid had so far spent on its campaign had ‘gone up in smoke’ and there was speculation in America that the US bid was dead in the water. Qatar had gone from being a rank outsider to being the country to beat. No one could claim the tiny Gulf state was not a serious and viable contender now. The FIFA president had said so.
Bin Hammam was delighted. He wrote to Blatter after he returned to Zurich in May rhapsodising that it had been wonderful to have the FIFA president back in his ‘home Qatar’, adding: ‘It was really very pleasant moments to my heart that we exchanged brotherhood discussions.’ Blatter was duly rewarded. Later that summer, Bin Hammam neutralised the threat he had issued at the AFC congress in Seoul. ‘Let me be very clear, I will not run against Sepp Blatter: I will be backing him to remain in office for a new mandate. He is my very good friend,’ he told journalists. The presidential powerplay had paid off handsomely, and all was well again.
Keeping the African voters sweet remained a priority for Bin Hammam as the official Qatar 2022 committee prepared to unveil the bid book containing its bold plan for a desert World Cup to FIFA in May. A fortnight after Blatter’s visit, on 7 May, Bin Hammam headed down to Abidjan, the home of Jacques Anouma, the Ivory Coast executive committee voter who had pledged to ‘push hard’ for a Qatar World Cup following the Doha junkets. He was there to preside over the inauguration ceremony for the Ivory Coast’s third FIFA Goal Bureau project to improve the facilities of a football training centre at Bingerville, an eastern suburb of the Ivorian capital.
The Goal Programme had long been mired in allegations that Blatter had used the development cash to buy African support for his presidency in successive elections and, as the president’s placeman heading its committee, Bin Hammam understood its power to peddle soft influence only too well. In the two years before the World Cup ballot, three of the Exco voters’ home country associations – Nigeria, Cameroon and the Ivory Coast – were recipients of Goal generosity. Anouma’s football association had already received two tranches of $400,000 from FIFA to build this National Technical Centre in Bingerville, a city where children still died from starvation and poverty was commonplace. This third project was funded by another $400,000 from FIFA to improve the dormitory facilities and build a new gym at the centre. Indeed, Anouma’s pet scheme would receive a further $400,000 for an unprecedented fourth Goal project a month before the ballot. The record was seen as a badge of pride for Anouma.
A large crowd had gathered from far and wide on the centre’s football pitch for the event. There were the usual town bigwigs and two government ministers. But the guest list had been arranged by Amadou Diallo and as a result football officials from no fewer than 17 African countries had flown in to the Ivory Coast – including Amos Adamu. Diallo had also brought in Christian Karembeu, his ally from the Netherlands–Belgium bid who had himself been lobbying Anouma. Karembeu was pictured showing off his skills, juggling a football for the photographers. The ceremony started with Bin Hammam cutting a ribbon and unveiling a foundation stone. Then Anouma launched into a long speech expressing his appreciation and thanking almost everyone present on the pitch by name. There was only a fleeting mention of the ‘Qatar delegation’, but any savvy observer would have deduced that the men from the Gulf state were the most significant guests.
The members of the Qatar 2022 bid committee stayed out of shot of the many photographs that were published after the event. The bid committee’s attendance had been organised by Diallo, and Bin Hammam’s staff had hired their private jet for the trip – later sending the $105,000 bill for the plane to the bid. Alongside Bin Hammam on the jet to the Ivory Coast were the four leading figures in the bid: Hassan Al-Thawadi, the chief executive; Ali Al-Thawadi, his deputy; Hamoud Al Subaey, director of government affairs; and Sheikh Sultan bin Abdulrahman Al-Thani, director of international relations. The bid committee liked to keep its distance from Bin Hammam publicly, determinedly maintaining that he was not associated with their campaign, but this was too good an opportunity to miss. By making their presence felt at the ceremony in Bingerville that day, the official Qatar bid team could piggyback on the goodwill Bin Hammam had secured by dishing out the Goal Programme cash to the Ivory Coast. This was the sort of advantage that came from having a powerful point-man inside FIFA: the perfect chance to rub shoulders with the African voters and remind them of Qatar’s generosity to their continent as they prepared to unveil the details of its bid proposal.
The ceremony in Bingerville had coincided with another happy event: Bin Hammam’s 61st birthday on 8 May. When he returned to Doha he found his inbox full, as usual, with gushing emails wishing him many happy returns. Flattered, Bin Hammam sent a global email to all his acolytes in the AFC thanking them for their kind messages, but one correspondent deserved special attention. He replied by letter to Fedor Radmann expressing his gratitude to the German fixer and his ‘lovely’ wife Michaela for remembering him on his ‘special day’.
Chirakal was busy chartering a jet to fly 14 members of Qatar’s bid committee to Zurich to hand over their 20-chapter bid book on 13 May, but there was another important matter to attend to before they took off. It was time for Bin Hammam to top up the coffers of that familiar rascal, Jack Warner. He’d known Jack for more years than he cared to recall. They had pressed shoulders in the premium seats at some of the world’s best stadiums; they had swapped stories at some of the world’s most tedious FIFA congresses; they had sparred on committees; and in happier times they had plotted long into the night to make sure their patron Blatter retained the presidency.
Jack was a live-wire, a coiled spring, as funny as he was outrageous: a useful friend but a dangerous opponent. Bin Hammam had seized a chance to quell this unpredictable bundle of energy in 2006 with his righteous outburst about Jack’s black-market ticket business in the ethics committee meeting. It should have proved fatal, but the man who styled himself by email as ‘d’survivor’ had brushed off the attack by calling in favours from his executive committee friends and walked away as ever with his head held high. There was no doubt: Jack Warner remained a force to be reckoned with. Bin Hammam therefore had done everything he could to repair the damage to their friendship, including opening his chequebook wide. It had worked, and Warner now called him ‘my only brother in football’.
The Qatari had taken Warner to China back in 2008, flattering his ego by calling on his expertise as a ‘consultant’ to the Vision Asia project and paying for his flights, hotels and chauffeur-driven limousines all the way. The pair were accompanied on their junket by the wily old lobbyist Peter Hargitay, and the group narrowly escaped disaster when the Sichuan earthquake struck the Chengdu Shuangliu International Airport – just moments after their private jet took off from its runway. The calamity provided a useful cover for Bin Hammam to spoon a bit more honey into Jack’s teapot. He wired Warner $250,000 that year as a goodwill gesture, ostensibly to cover ‘losses’ he had sustained to his personal property in the earthquake they had escaped. Now the great survivor was back for more.
Warner was a player. As the president of CONCACAF he held sway over the confederation’s three Exco votes, including his own. As we have seen, FIFA’s rules forbade any associate of a bid committee from giving voters any benefit which might appear to influence them in the bidding process. But there was no other way of keeping Jack happy and this was an important moment, with Qatar on the cusp of unveiling its bid book to the world. On 12 May, the day before the delegation flew to Zurich to hand over the document to Blatter, Najeeb Chirakal wrote to Amelia Gan and Jenny Be at the AFC to tell them Bin Hammam wanted the details of the bank account ‘where you have last made a transfer to Jack Warner’. Be responded attaching a document containing the CONCACAF bank details, explaining ‘this was the account we made the transfers to’. The money would be paid through one of the Kemco slush funds and even FIFA’s crack new investigator Chris Eaton would find it difficult to get to the bottom of one transaction among millions from an electrical company in a country as secretive as Qatar. So Chirakal ordered the Kemco clerks to pay the CONCACAF account which Warner controlled a further $200,000.
Two days later, Sheikh Mohammed and Hassan Al-Thawadi touched down in Zurich with 12 of their colleagues on a jet chartered for them by Chirakal in his capacity as a bid employee. They were chauffeured to FIFA headquarters, where they met Sepp Blatter and Jérôme Valcke to present their bid book. The tome revealed for the first time the full details of what the first World Cup in the Middle East would entail. It set out plans for 12 proposed stadiums, and promised that Qatar 2022 would be a carbon-neutral World Cup, using eco-friendly technologies and state-of-the-art cooling systems for stadiums, fan zones and training grounds. Spectators, players and officials would enjoy comfortable open-air conditions not above 27°C, the bid book promised. Qatar’s transportation system would be revolutionised with a new Doha International Airport and the new Qatar Metro high-speed rail network linking all 12 stadiums.
That day, Sheikh Mohammed released a statement saying: ‘The submission of our bid book today in Zurich is a historic moment for Qatar and its people. Today I am here not only on behalf of the Government of Qatar and all those involved in the game of football; I am here to represent the dream of each and every single boy and young girl of Qatar, to express and share with you the passion of our athletes and our fans who have supported our Bid from the very beginning, to manifest the desire of every family in our region who has shared our ambitions and hopes to bring the World Cup to the Qatari people. A World Cup in Qatar will be a New World Cup, bringing people and different cultures together in the name of football. Our bid book sends a clear message: Qatar is ready.’
The bid team flew home the following day, on the jet chartered by Chirakal. Four days later, the fat sum of $200,000 plopped into Jack Warner’s CONCACAF bank account. The ever-efficient Chirakal sent a confirmation email back to Bin Hammam on 18 May 2010 enclosing a facsimile of the payment slip to Warner, with the note: ‘Dear President, please find attached the document for your information.’ Bin Hammam’s loyal aide would one day come to regret leaving a paper trail like that. While Bin Hammam was not officially associated with the bid, keeping the taint of his corrupt payments away from its leaders, Chirakal had signed an employment contract with Qatar 2022 earlier that year. Warner was one of the 24 voters who would be sent the bid book Qatar had just submitted to FIFA and asked to assess its merits ahead of the secret ballot that December. Now he would also have Bin Hammam’s $200,000 payment weighing on his mind – and it had been facilitated by an employee of Qatar’s official 2022 bid.
Qatar had suffered a few knocks since the controversy over its sponsorship of the Angola congress, but now it was time for fortune to favour the brave once more. While Bin Hammam was mulling over his payment to Warner, a major controversy had broken out which completely distracted the world’s media from Qatar’s behaviour. The England bid had imploded in spectacular fashion. It was a very English farce that would never have happened in Qatar. The World Cup was due to start in South Africa the following month, and the ballot for 2018 and 2022 was less than six months away. Lord David Maxim Triesman, the 66-year-old FA chairman who was leading the English bid, had met a younger woman for coffee in a London café a couple of weeks earlier. The woman, a 37-year-old civil servant named Melissa Jacobs, had dined with Triesman several times and the pair had exchanged some mildly flirtatious texts.
On this occasion, she had decided to record their conversation covertly and hand the tapes to a national newspaper whose photographer was waiting outside the café with a long lens. Over coffee Triesman, formerly a junior government minister, entertained Jacobs with gossip he had picked up while travelling the world promoting England’s bid. Soon after the meeting, Triesman heard the stomach-churning news that the Mail on Sunday newspaper was planning to publish his indiscreet comments to the world. Despite the FA’s eleventh-hour attempt to halt publication of the story with a court injunction, it became front-page news and Triesman was forced to fall on his sword immediately. The headline read: ‘FA Chief: Spain in bid to bribe World Cup referees.’
In the tape recording, Lord Triesman had told Jacobs: ‘There’s some evidence that the Spanish football authorities are trying to identify the referees . . . and pay them.’ He continued with an overly optimistic view of England’s chances. ‘I think the Africans we are doing very well with. I think we’re doing kind of well with some of the Asians. Probably doing well with Central and North America,’ he said.
Bin Hammam knew the African and Asian voters well, and there wasn’t a prayer of them voting for England. The chances of the self-styled home of fair play and moral rectitude securing the backing of men like Jack Warner and his North American cronies were even more laughable. His Lordship had continued by saying: ‘My assumption is that the Latin Americans, although they’ve not said so, will vote for Spain.’ He was right about that, and Bin Hammam was factoring the Latin voting bloc into his strategy. Then Triesman had returned to his extraordinary allegation about a Spanish plot to rig the upcoming World Cup in South Africa through bribery. ‘If Spain drop out, because Spain are looking for help from the Russians to help bribe the referees in the World Cup, their votes may then switch to Russia.’ This whole idea seemed preposterous to Bin Hammam. Spain were the best team in the world: why would they need to bribe referees? Lord Triesman later admitted he had merely been passing on tittle-tattle he had learnt from unnamed journalists.
The whole affair was acutely embarrassing for the stuffed shirts who ran English football, and Bin Hammam soon received a grovelling letter from Sir David Richards, the vice-chairman of the FA. ‘Dear president, on behalf of The FA I would like to sincerely apologise for any embarrassment which has been caused to FIFA and the national associations due to alleged comments attributed to Lord Triesman on Sunday in an English newspaper,’ the letter began. ‘In my capacity as Vice Chairman of the The FA I wanted to notify you personally that Lord Triesman has resigned as both Chairman of The FA and Chairman of England’s FIFA World Cup Bid Board. Clearly, the newspaper reports are highly embarrassing and I want to make clear to you and everyone at FIFA that the comments allegedly made by Lord Triesman do not in any way reflect or represent the personal, private or official views of the FA, England’s FIFA World Cup Bid Board or myself.’
Bin Hammam replied graciously. ‘I really appreciate your taking the time to explain the situation to me,’ he wrote. ‘Wishing you all the best and looking forward to seeing you in the future.’
This was too delicious. The England bid was finished. Its Exco member Geoff Thompson was rushed in to lead the bid as Triesman’s replacement, but that was all they needed. Thompson was universally disliked by the members of the bid, who said they felt his promotion of the country’s campaign had been decidedly lacklustre because he had been piqued at having been initially overlooked for the job as chair. Senior figures on England’s bid board complained privately that Thompson was ‘a terribly self-serving man’ who was doing ‘nothing to help us’. One was even heard dismissing England’s voter as being ‘just a blazer – a small-minded man from Chesterfield’. And now they were stuck with him. It was all very amusing to Bin Hammam.
What’s more, Spain were furious, Russia were incandescent and the members of the FIFA executive committee roundly deplored Lord Triesman’s indiscretions. While the FIFA family fulminated in the 48 hours after the story broke, Bin Hammam’s $200,000 bung slipped unnoticed into Warner’s bank account. The FIFA ethics committee, which had been asked by Blatter to keep an eye on the bidding process, launched an immediate investigation into Triesman’s claims, politely asking the Spanish and Russians whether they were paying bribes. Following their inevitable denials, the new ethics chair Sulser promptly declared that there was no evidence, and all was forgotten. This was the sleepy ethics committee Bin Hammam knew so well. They had not even involved their new investigator, but Bin Hammam was keeping a wary eye on Chris Eaton nonetheless. The cowboy-booted corruption fighter remained a potential threat.
The South African World Cup was now on the horizon and, on 28 May, an email arrived in Bin Hammam’s inbox inviting him to a black-tie event on the eve of the tournament at the Vodaworld centre in Midrand, Johannesburg. The message was from Samson Adamu with a haplessly glaring error in the opening line. ‘Dear Sir,’ the 26-year-old wrote. ‘As the distinguished President of UEFA, Kinetic Sports Management requests the honour of your presence at the first ever African Legends dinner. The African Football Legends dinner is an exclusive event to honour the continent’s football heroes.’ There was no reference to the Qatar 2022 bid as official sponsors. What had happened?
After the scheduled meeting in London with the Qatar bid in March, Samson had steamed ahead with the preparations for the dinner. He had sub-contracted organisation duties to a South African sports events company called Champion Tours, which quickly calculated that the dinner would cost a maximum of $220,000. The event was to go ahead on 8 July, two days earlier than originally planned. The organisers had been driven to distraction by the lack of coordination from Samson. No running order or table plan was put in place, and the young entrepreneur did not arrive at the venue until two hours before the event was due to start. At the last moment, he announced that an additional 30 places had to be included for extra guests, further instructing the organisers to hire eight hostesses and have special costumes made for them to wear. A seamstress was brought in the evening before the event and made to work through the night to get the outfits ready.
On the evening of the dinner, Samson seemed less than self-assured as he stood to address the candlelit ballroom packed with the great and the good of African football. Admittedly, he was looking sharp in his well-cut black suit and a crisp white dress shirt, but he spoke haltingly as he welcomed the 300 eminent guests. At the tables were leading figures from the world of football including David Dein, the ex-Arsenal chairman, and Lennart Johansson, the former UEFA president. The members of the CAF executive committee kept their promise to ‘grace’ the event with their presence, as did around six FIFA Exco members. There were 20 famous former African footballers, including Bin Hammam’s friend Kalusha Bwalya, the former Zambian winger, and Jomo Somo, the former South African midfielder, who had been flown business class into Johannesburg to be honoured at the dinner.
The guests were welcomed by Issa Hayatou, the CAF president, and Kirsten Nematandani, the president of the South African FA. Samson had every reason to feel on edge. It was the first time he had ever organised an event on anything close to this scale. To add to the pressure, his father Amos Adamu was watching closely from a nearby table in full Nigerian costume as his son assured the glittering crowd that his company had ‘no commercial affiliates’ and was driven by one pure goal: ‘To celebrate with you the achievement of our past football heroes.’
As the guests sipped champagne, enjoyed live African music and their three-course dinner, they may not have stopped to wonder where their young host had found the funds to provide them with such a lavish evening of free entertainment. Mysteriously, Qatar did not make any attempt to promote itself as a sponsor and left no trace of its involvement with the dinner. An early guest list drawn up by Samson showed that a table of eight was initially reserved for Qatar 2022, but nobody from the bid team actually attended the event on the night. Something had spooked the bid in the months since they first sent Samson the contract. Perhaps it was a hangover from the row over the sponsorship of the Angola congress, or the fact that the reformed FIFA ethics committee – with a serious investigator at its disposal – were now actively looking into the bidding process. The official Qatar bid team would say, when questioned later, that they had backed out of the deal after belatedly considering the ‘relevant FIFA rules’.
So who did pay for the dinner? Samson’s company, with its share capital of just £4,000, could never have afforded it, especially as the tickets were free and there was no visible sponsor. Samson’s lawyer, Magerle, said the meeting with the Qatar bid officials in London had never gone ahead because the deal had fallen through for reasons which were unknown to him. He had aborted the plan to set up a Swiss association and did not know how the dinner was financed, but assumed his client had found some other source of ready money.
A prominent African journalist had been approached by Amos Adamu in March to ask for help identifying legendary footballers to honour at his son’s dinner. The journalist said he was later told by Samson that the event was being paid for by ‘friends in Qatar’. Was this so? If so, which Qatari individual or organisation had picked up the tab dropped by the 2022 bid? Samson also brought in a friend called Nadia Mihindou to help him with arrangements for the dinner. She believed the event was being paid for with ‘private funds’ arranged by Samson, but would not say exactly where the money had come from. When told that her friend had been all set to receive $1 million from backers in the Gulf state, she responded incredulously. ‘If that dinner had cost a million dollars, I think I would have known about it.’
The funding of the African Legends Dinner would remain shrouded in mystery. It was not so much a whodunit as a whopaidit. Two years later, when The Sunday Times published documents exposing Qatar’s $1 million offer to the son of a voter to host the event, Samson’s little deal with the Qatar bid would spark the biggest internal ethics investigation FIFA has ever undertaken. But the puzzle remains unsolved.