A tiny secret camera had been carefully positioned on the smoked glass table of the hotel room, pointed directly at Michel Zen-Ruffinen. The former FIFA secretary general had continued to work in football as a lawyer since his well-publicised falling out with Sepp Blatter eight years earlier, and was now advising some lobbyists backing the American bid on the contest to host the World Cup. He had been promised a £230,000 consultancy fee and had been working his football contacts as hard as he could in return. Zen-Ruffinen had renewed his acquaintance with Mohamed bin Hammam’s fixer Amadou Diallo in Cairo the previous month and had been in phone contact with him for several weeks.
A tall man in crisp blue shirt and dark tie, Zen-Ruffinen had greyed a little around the edges since his FIFA days. His brows furrowed as he delivered some bad news to the lobbyists in the privacy of his London hotel room on the morning of 13 October 2010. The hidden camera recorded every word: ‘There is an alliance Qatar [and] Spain, and there are seven votes committed to Qatar right now, but committed, committed which is probably impossible to turn . . . and that’s a real alliance. It’s bound, tacked with a nice gift ribbon and that’s really problematic. This is the most problematic thing. I was informed about it last week. And this is not just a rumour, that’s a fact.’
Five days later, a copy of the video containing Zen-Ruffinen’s comments was handed to a FIFA official at Heathrow airport. The official boarded the first flight to Zurich and delivered the package by hand to the desk of the ethics committee secretary in the headquarters of world football’s governing body. That day Jérôme Valcke, Zen-Ruffinen’s successor as secretary general, summoned the man with the handlebar moustache and cowboy boots into his office. FIFA’s new investigator, Chris Eaton, was to be tasked with looking into Zen-Ruffinen’s allegations about Qatar’s collusion with the Spain–Portugal bid. Bin Hammam’s covert deal with the Iberians had been unmasked. This was serious: there were just over six weeks left before the secret World Cup ballot and Eaton was threatening to dismantle a key pillar of his strategy.
It was to be a bloody week for FIFA. The Sunday Times Insight team had gone undercover after receiving insider tip-offs about corruption in the World Cup bidding process, and Zen-Ruffinen was one of nine FIFA figures who they had secretly recorded during their investigation. Posing as lobbyists working in support of the US 2022 campaign, Jonathan Calvert and a former colleague had spent four months going round the bidding circuit finding out what it would take to win the ballot.
The first instalment of their investigation had appeared in the newspaper that weekend under the banner headline ‘World Cup Votes for Sale’, and it had thrown the competition into chaos. FIFA had demanded the newspaper’s evidence and the Insight team was pleased that their findings were being taken seriously by world football’s governing body, so Calvert was happy to hand over the package of tapes to the official at the airport on 18 October 2010. It contained multiple allegations of bungs, bribes and requests for payment, implicating FIFA executive committee members in a seismic scandal that shook world football’s governing body to the core.
Two executive committee members, Amos Adamu and Reynald Temarii, were instantly placed under provisional suspension and it now appeared highly unlikely that they would participate in the 2 December ballot. Adamu had been caught on camera agreeing to sell his vote for the 2018 tournament, and it was a disaster for Bin Hammam to lose the Nigerian Exco member whose vote he was counting on. Temarii had been recorded asking an undercover reporter seeking his vote for NZ$3 million (US$2.3 million) for a sports academy.
A further four of the FIFA executive committee’s former officials were relieved from their football duties, pending the ethics committee’s investigation. Their colleagues on the Exco fumed at the insolence of the English media and were aghast that FIFA had pandered to them by taking such a brutal action against their friends. But there was no choice. FIFA had the film in their possession and the world’s media were bearing down like never before. Questions were being asked about whether the World Cup ballot should now be postponed. The boil needed to be lanced post-haste.
It was bad enough for Bin Hammam to have lost a key voter in Adamu, and for the bidding process to be exposed to such scrutiny in the full glare of the world’s media, but that was not the worst of it. Eaton’s investigation into the collusion deal with Spain was the most awful consequence of the bomb The Sunday Times had dropped. This sort of meddling was exactly what Bin Hammam had feared when Blatter announced the ethics committee was going to be overseeing the bidding process. Bin Hammam had previously asked his lawyers whether there was any way to challenge the unnecessary interference of FIFA’s sleepy ethics men, but he had been told there was nothing he could do to stand in their way. Eaton’s intervention was the last straw. This was the first time that FIFA had enlisted a proactive sleuth to police the bids. Could they really do this? There certainly wasn’t anything in the statutes about using the services of an investigator to carry out the work of the ethics committee. Where would Eaton’s investigation lead? What else might he find out?
For FIFA’s new investigator, this was the first big opportunity to cut his teeth on some serious work. Eaton instantly recognised the developing scandal as a great chance to build his empire. ‘This is the time for me to push a good security structure for FIFA,’ he said in an email to a friend. ‘My attitude is that we have one big shot here to get it right operationally and politically,’ he wrote later to another associate. ‘This combination of incidents will force FIFA to create an internal capability they never really thought they would need. So we will take that positive out of it if nothing else.’
Valcke wanted Eaton to report directly to him on the collusion allegations, independently of the ethics committee which already had its hands full dealing with the other evidence contained in the package the newspaper had supplied. Football’s favourite spin doctor Peter Hargitay was also on the case, emailing Valcke with a story from the Daily Telegraph, once the news of the investigation had been officially announced that evening. ‘In case there are further similar pieces, I send them to you.’ Hargitay kindly offered to his friend ‘cher Jérôme’.
Eaton had his work cut out for him with Qatar – the official bid committee was not going to accept his interference without a fight. Immediately after receiving a dossier of the allegations in the secret tapes from The Sunday Times, Hassan Al-Thawadi had written a furious letter to FIFA demanding that the ethics committee exonerate his bid. The letter from the Qatar bid chief executive was indignant. ‘We are writing to you to inform you of allegations presented to us by The Sunday Times,’ he wrote. ‘The Insight Editor, requested our comments on 14 October 2010, as he is legally obliged to do so. The accusations he presented are completely unfounded, including allegations of collusion and bribery, all of which are completely false.’
Al-Thawadi was particularly stung that the newspaper had quoted FIFA’s rules at Qatar in its letter. He continued: ‘The article also makes reference to the Bid registration rules. Based on FIFA’s instructions, we understand that this document, along with all bid documents, is strictly confidential. We question how The Sunday Times was able to obtain a copy of it. We are outraged. As we’re sure you can appreciate, these allegations not only damage our bid to host the 2022 World Cup, but they also disparage the honor of the State of Qatar. The bid has always adhered to the highest ethical standards, in line with the State of Qatar’s policies. We are conducting our own investigation into these matters, and strongly urge the FIFA Ethics Committee to also look into them.’
On the same day, Al-Thawadi sent a separate message to Bin Hammam’s personal email account attaching a copy of FIFA’s bidding rules on collusion and gifts to football officials. His email did not say why he felt the need to refresh his countryman’s memory about such illicit practices when Bin Hammam, a former member of the ethics committee, already knew they were strictly prohibited.
Eaton got down to business straight away, firing off identical letters to the Qatar and Iberian bids. He addressed the first letter to Ali Al-Thawadi, the Qatar bid’s deputy chief executive: ‘Greetings to you,’ he wrote. ‘My name is Chris Eaton and I am the Security Adviser to FIFA. Secretary General Valcke has directed me to investigate the recent media reports of collusion between your Committee and the bidding Committees of Portugal/Spain. My purpose in writing to you is firstly to introduce both myself and my role in investigating this media report, and secondly to ask you whether you and your Committee will cooperate with my investigation. Should you agree to cooperate with the investigation, and as a first step, can you advise as soon as possible of the name and contact details of the person in your Committee who will be my point of contact and with whom I will initiate my inquiries.’
A couple of hours later he sent both bids a further message to say: ‘To be clear my investigation under the direction of SG Valcke, is independent of and additional to the ongoing investigation of the FIFA Ethics Committee.’ The Iberian bid responded immediately offering full cooperation, but Doha remained silent.
Eaton had been with FIFA for just six months but he realised he would have to tip-toe gingerly through a minefield of internal political agendas – especially if he was to use the investigation to cement his position in the organisation. One of his security team, an Englishman named Terry Steans, wrote to warn him that any investigation into Qatar was sensitive because Bin Hammam was said to have funded Sepp Blatter’s election campaigns. ‘It means you treading carefully if Hammam is that close to the President,’ wrote Steans, an outwardly gentle teddy-bear of a man with a sharp grasp of football politics who often took the role of Eaton’s consiglieri. ‘I appreciate this heads up mate,’ Eaton responded. ‘I am pretty well aware of how close Blatter is to Bin Hammam. I’ll take it into account in my approach, but that’s all.’ Eaton was already of the view that Qatar was colluding with Spain, but he knew it would be hard to prove. ‘From what I can see there is nothing solid yet on the collusion, but on the balance of probabilities, it happened,’ he wrote to Steans. ‘I am working from that premise.’
The package containing the evidence from The Sunday Times had been copied and distributed to Eaton and his team. In his small office in FIFA headquarters, Eaton placed a disc into his computer, swung his boots up on the table and sat back to watch the footage. There was hours of it. The reporters had posed as lobbyists representing a consortium supporting the American bid and they had initially met a series of former FIFA officials who were offering their services as consultants advising on how to secure votes. Their tapes were to be quite an education about the darker side of FIFA for its new security advisor.
The scene in the first tape was a table elegantly set with an array of glasses. Into shot came a bald man, dark-eyed in his late thirties, wearing an open-necked blue shirt and black jacket. The accompanying notes from the newspaper indicated that this was Michel Bacchini, who had been employed as FIFA’s director of competitions for eight years and was now running his own football consultancy. The footage had been filmed in August at a Michelin-starred restaurant on the banks of Lake Zurich, a five-minute drive down the hill from Bacchini’s home. The athletic Swiss consultant had represented Indonesia’s short-lived bid for 2022 and had clearly been doing his homework. He knew an awful lot about the bidding process, which he was confidently imparting to his two lunch companions.
Bacchini’s advice to the fake American lobbyists was that votes would come with strings attached and that often meant paying money, alas. The way to win votes was to encourage big corporations to offer FIFA executive committee members business deals that would generate income for them. This had to be done at arm’s length. He advised his lunch companions that the voters would have ‘somebody doing their job for them’ who would cut a side deal on their behalf. ‘And when it comes to the worst, he doesn’t know anything, you know, you can’t trace anything because it’s somewhere in an account which is not him, in the beginning,’ he said. Warming to his theme, he said he knew ‘how to get to’ one member of the committee who he alleged had become wealthy as a result of his dealings with the successful German bid for the 2006 World Cup. That man’s vote would cost ‘easily’ $1 million. But such approaches would come at a price. ‘I can reach out easily to several [FIFA Exco] members myself. But you have to consider I take a big risk and if I take a big risk, this would be significantly more expensive. I need to cover my risk,’ he said.
In preparation for the lunch, Bacchini had been thinking about how to make sure an Exco member could be made to honour a pledge of support. He had learnt much from his bitter experience working for the Moroccan bid as a consultant in the run-up to the May 2004 ballot for the 2010 World Cup, eventually won by South Africa. He claimed his Moroccan colleagues had paid Jack Warner upfront for his vote, but the Trinidadian executive committee member had double-crossed them. ‘They were paying him and at the end when they were voting here in Zurich, you know, he was making a big scene, he was running out of the hotel complaining that somebody was cheating. He was the guy who cheated, he was making a big scenario out of it. I know a hundred hundred per cent that he was voting for the South Africans and pretended to vote for the Moroccans. . . . I always say you never have to pay any money upfront.’ His proposed solution was to place the money in an escrow, from which it would be released only once the American bid had been successful.
Even to a seasoned investigator such as Eaton, the frank discussion of such illicit practices must have been surprising. And there was worse to come. The main threat to the American bid, Bacchini contended, came from Bin Hammam and Qatar, ‘because of the money’. ‘I know that Bin Hammam is working on 2022 – for Qatar,’ he said. As the cameras rolled, Bacchini set out his understanding of where Qatar’s bid was. He had been making phone calls and was confident that Bin Hammam had the support of the Africans – Jacques Anouma, Amos Adamu and Issa Hayatou. He was unsure about Hany Abo Rida, because he was unfamiliar with this newcomer to the executive committee. Worawi Makudi was a certain voter for Qatar. ‘He’s a Bin Hammam guy, you have to know he’s Bin Hammam,’ said Bacchini. ‘He is in this position because of him, he backs him and so on. He would only change his opinion if the top guy comes, which is only one guy, the [FIFA] president, or he gets a really good deal.’
Bacchini believed Bin Hammam was also wooing Chung Mong-joon. He continued: ‘And I know Bin Hammam is clever enough, he knows that a guy like Chung, he’s not giving his vote for the first vote or the second-round votes, because if Korea stays in, he would always vote for Korea. Once it’s out, then we need to get his vote. So that’s where you win.’ Chung was not someone whose vote could be bought because ‘he is just straight’, but the way to appeal to him was with ‘power, politics’. Bacchini was absolutely sure the three South American voters were backing Spain for 2018 – which apparently confirmed at least half of the story about the collusion deal with the Qatar. There was a possible lead for Eaton.
Reynald Temarii was almost certainly voting for Australia, and Bacchini thought Qatar would struggle with the European voters. ‘The Europeans don’t want to have Bin Hammam having the World Cup in Qatar. But he tries,’ he said. Bin Hammam was a dangerous foe. Bacchini warned his two new friends that the Americans would have to have deep pockets ‘because the Qataris are, hey I mean Qataris, they don’t care, they pay you ten million’.
Eaton could see that Bacchini had no direct evidence that Bin Hammam was offering payments to the voters, but he was a seasoned insider in world football and his comments were worth bearing in mind. It was time to flick on to the next recording. A bulky figure with a voluminous grey jacket and mottled skin filled the screen, almost blotting out what appeared to be the interior of a hotel bar behind him. It was Ismail Bhamjee, who had been a FIFA executive committee member for eight years before he was forced to resign over a ticketing scandal four years earlier. Bhamjee was popular and well known in world football, and he remained an honorary member of CAF.
Aged 66, Bhamjee was a grandee who had been to every World Cup since 1966. But experience had clearly not brought him discretion. Was it really necessary for him to confide in the two lobbyists he was meeting for the first time that FIFA had paid his $150,000 a year salary, plus expenses, into a London bank account so that he could dodge tax in his home country, Botswana? It was to get worse. Bhamjee was apparently sipping only water, not alcohol, but he was becoming increasingly loose-lipped.
Like Bacchini, he told a story about Warner receiving a bung to support Morocco in 2004. ‘I know they gave, they gave, Jack Warner personally a lot of money for the CONCACAF. But please, this is confidential . . . he got, I think, a million-plus something dollars.’ Bhamjee had been there as an Exco member with a vote. Warner wasn’t the only one allegedly taking bribes. He named three close colleagues from the executive committee whom he claimed had been given cash to vote for Morocco. He believed the amount paid was $250,000 per head. Now he was instructing the lobbyists to do the same if they wished to win over the African voters. ‘We speak to them and say, “You guarantee us your vote” . . . We tell them: “Look, we give you two hundred thousand dollars and if we win the bid, we’ll add on another two hundred thousand dollars”.’
The old hand confided that he was pessimistic about Qatar’s chances of bringing the World Cup to Doha, although he said it with a heavy heart because he was ‘close’ to Bin Hammam. ‘I doubt most people will go for it because it’s too hot. And although they’ve said they have closed roofs, air-conditioners, it would be very difficult. But I didn’t want to say anything now, because Bin Hammam is a friend of mine.’ Loyalty did not, however, stop him from being even more indiscreet about the activities of his friend’s country. Bhamjee had been told that the Africans would receive payments from Qatar for their 2022 vote. ‘Anything from a quarter to half a million dollars . . . This is separate from the football,’ he said, and it was to be money for their own personal use.27 Bhamjee was later to send a £100,000 invoice to the lobbyists for his advice that evening.
The recordings continued to roll on. Eaton called up a video which had been filmed in a high-ceilinged salon in Paris where another current official was touting his services as a World Cup consultant for £300,000. This was the moustachioed Slim Aloulou, the 68-year-old chairman of the FIFA disputes resolution committee, who has been around FIFA for 30 years and had spent 16 years on the executive committee before being made an honorary member in 2004.
The lobbyists enquired as to how World Cup votes had been acquired in the past, and what was a reasonable offer to make. ‘What I can tell you is that a little while ago, these things were really not common, unlike what is said,’ Aloulou replied. ‘Unfortunately, I hear that this kind of practice is spreading more and more. About amounts, I can’t frankly tell you, but these amounts must be quite high. It’s not for peanuts. I can make inquiries and try to figure that out.’ The lobbyists said they were thinking of paying $800,000 per vote for football projects and Aloulou agreed that the figure was in the right ball-park, but thought they would need to up it to ‘around a million dollars’. He explained: ‘Yes, yes! Per member. I think, but the cost might be even higher than I think. I believe it could be around that level. You know, people invest much more than that to get the World Cup.’
Then there was a series of six phone calls on a crackly line to Mali with Amadou Diakite, another former FIFA Exco member, who now served on the referees’ committee. Diakite was also offering his services as a consultant and claimed to be in constant contact with African Exco members – although it wasn’t clear from the recordings whether he was acting through an intermediary. Qatar, according to Diakite, was already in pole position. ‘I think that Qatar could be favourite for 2022. This is the impression I got,’ he said. This was because the Gulf state had offered each of the African members huge sums of money to finance unspecified ‘projects’ in their home countries. ‘I think it’s about one million dollars to one point two million dollars of projects they are going to realise . . . they proposed that to the four African voters this year for projects they are going to do in their country,’ he said. The FIFA official then agreed to find out whether the Africans could be turned away from Qatar and persuaded to vote for America if the consortium purportedly supporting the bid offered more money. He advised that it would be normal to make a financial offer ahead of the ballot and the voters would collect the cash once the bid was successful.28
The former Exco members were seemingly queuing up to spill the committee’s secrets. There was now a cheerfully chubby Polynesian hogging the screen. Eaton glanced down to his notes. This one had been recorded in a hotel near the airport in Auckland, New Zealand. It was Ahongalu Fusimalohi, the former FIFA executive committee member who had been ousted when Reynald Temarii took his Oceania seat three years earlier. He was keen as mustard to work with the lobbyists and share his wisdom on how to secure votes.
For Fusimalohi, vote-buying was not in itself wrong, but there was a practical trade-off between the size of the financial reward and the risk if someone found out. As an executive committee member six years previously, he had been offered an unsatisfactory bribe for his vote by the Moroccans, he claimed. ‘They were trying to buy me cheap, but my selling price would have been a full retirement, and in shame, if I was to ever get caught, so I said sorry,’ he said. The amount was a substantial sum, $150,000 or more, but that was not enough. He continued: ‘And they’d put it in a separate bank account and I said, “Bullshit, if I get caught I mean that’s a waste of my whole career. I’m not going to buy into this small-time petty cash money.”’ His advice for the current campaign, however, was to pay a direct bung into the account of his successor, Temarii. ‘You’ve got twenty-four members making that decision,’ he continued. ‘It’s only corrupt if you get caught – these people will go all over the world . . . to get it at any price. It’s sad but it’s true.’
Assessing the strengths of the various bids, Fusimalohi said England stood little chance because they were too careful to abide by the rules. ‘England have got every reason why they should host the World Cup . . . but they don’t strike the deals,’ he said. He thought Qatar would struggle, too. ‘It is a dream that won’t come true for Bin Hammam. He is really going against Blatter, because it’s part of the challenge to overthrow him next year. If Chung Mong-joon does not stand, then Bin Hammam will stand.’ The winner of the contest to host the World Cup would have to offer financial assistance to the voters or their countries, he said. One of the fake lobbyists asked whether there might be difficulties if FIFA found out. ‘Oh yes,’ Fusimalohi replied. ‘It’s going to be a big problem. It has to be strictly confidential . . . The eleventh commandment of the CIA is just never get caught.’
It must have been an illuminating few hours for Eaton, discovering the seamy underside of his shiny new employer. Here were four former members of world football’s ruling committee – plus an ex-FIFA employee who had previously worked on World Cup bids – all saying the same thing. In order to win a contest to host the World Cup, you had to bribe some of the voters. The men clearly believed this had happened in the past, yet apparently none of them had reported these practices to the authorities. Moreover, they were now secretly advising these fake lobbyists that cash payments were the route to success in the current contest.
On the face of it, there were certainly sufficient allegations to investigate the Exco’s dealings with the Moroccan bid. But would Blatter and Valcke really want him to go about prising open a can of worms which was well past its sell-by date? Especially as the claims seemed to implicate the apparently untouchable Jack Warner. Eaton had also learnt that the relationship between Bin Hammam and Blatter needed to be handled with care. And what was Bin Hammam conniving at now? Was there any truth in the claims that Qatar had been offering inducements to the voters, as Bhamjee and Diakite had let slip? Should these allegations be part of a wider probe into Qatar, or should that poisoned chalice be left to the ethics committee?
It was time for Eaton to turn to the tape of the primary source for the collusion allegations, Zen-Ruffinen. There was a substantial amount of footage of the 51-year-old Swiss lawyer to wade through. He had been filmed at lunch in Geneva, at breakfast in Cairo and finally in his hotel room in London. This was Blatter’s protégé who had worked his way to the very top of FIFA’s bureaucracy before ill-advisedly attempting patricide by going public with a dossier pinning concerns about financial irregularities within the sports body on the president.
Blatter could not tolerate such a betrayal: ‘The executive committee will deal with our Mr Clean,’ he had tersely told a Swiss newspaper, before Zen-Ruffinen was forced to step down. Yet here was ‘Mr Clean’ rearing his unwelcome head again, only now he was getting grubby by advising these phony lobbyists on how to buy votes, just as the others had done. Although Zen-Ruffinen morally disagreed with vote rigging, he said this was how it worked: for a fee, he would find out what the members wanted and make the right introductions.
The first video showed Zen-Ruffinen at a table in the chintzy brasserie of the five-star Hotel d’Angleterre on the shores of Lake Geneva. FIFA’s ex-secretary general gave a withering assessment of the men who would vote in the World Cup ballot. It would have been amusing if his allegations weren’t so serious. Inevitably, he started with the notorious Jack Warner, who he described as ‘the biggest gangster you will find on earth’. Zen-Ruffinen alleged that Warner had profited handsomely from previous World Cup bids and would expect his palms to be lavishly greased once again. ‘I can imagine that the total of what he would receive in money and in other advantages would be as a minimum half a million,’ he said.
Ricardo Teixeira, the Brazilian Exco member, was also allegedly open to offers.29 ‘Teixeira, it’s money. We can go to Rio and talk with him on a terrace, no problem. Openly, openly,’ he said. A third member of the executive committee, he suggested, would have his head turned by ‘ladies and not with money’. A fourth was compromised because a video tape was in circulation which showed him having sex with a prostitute in a hotel room. A fifth, Amos Adamu, would want something for his vote: ‘The guy from Nigeria [Adamu] was also on the list as being okay to accept,’ said Zen-Ruffinen. And a sixth was ‘a nice guy’, but Zen-Ruffinen alleged that his vote was all about money and he was the ‘member who is asking for the most, I can tell you’. Zen-Ruffinen did not know how much it would cost, but he promised ‘I can sort it out.’
Fast forward to September 2010 and there was Zen-Ruffinen again, a few weeks later, sharing breakfast with the lobbyists in the gardens of Cairo’s luxury Marriott Hotel on the banks of the Nile. This was where the whole of the CAF executive committee was staying in preparation for a crucial meeting to make their final decision on which bid the continent’s four FIFA voters would back in the World Cup ballots. Hayatou, Adamu and Anouma were in town, although Abo Rida was not with them because he was standing for political office in Egypt.
Zen-Ruffinen had travelled there with the fake lobbyists to get among the voters. Over coffee and croissants, they discussed rumours that Bin Hammam’s fixer Amadou Diallo had sealed the votes of the four African members for Qatar. Zen-Ruffinen knew Diallo well and had been with him in the garden of that very hotel only the previous evening. He described Diallo as ‘a small guy from Guinea’ who had worked his way up through the federations and knew everything about football. ‘This is the kind of person who you never see officially somewhere but he will be everywhere,’ he added enigmatically. ‘He is definitely the right person to talk to because he is the world champion of lobbying.’
The camera was now jerkily entering a wood-panelled room. It was the office of the president at CAF headquarters in Cairo. The stooped frame of Issa Hayatou was sitting uneasily in a small chair at the centre of the picture wearing a spotlessly white boubou. He leant across to his coffee table and prodded a large carved wooden statue of a British lion to show that its tail was dropping off. The sculpture was falling apart just like the England bid which had presented it to him a year earlier. The side of Zen-Ruffinen’s head popped in and out of the picture as he spoke to Hayatou in French and then translated for the two fake lobbyists.
The CAF president was explaining why it was important for bidding countries to have the backing of federations across Africa if they wanted the continent’s four votes. The federations had been prohibited from discussing the ballot until the South African World Cup was over, and a special meeting of the CAF executive committee had been convened for 22 September when the continent’s position would be discussed for the first time. ‘He says the CAF statutes give him the right to centralise the African vote if there is a reason for people to do so,’ interpreted Zen-Ruffinen. Hayatou said he might not enforce the rule but he was certainly going to attempt to “harmonise’ the four votes in line with the CAF executive’s wishes. The lobbyists asked what they could do to help influence the decision. There was chatter in French before Zen-Ruffinen came back. ‘OK, so to answer your specific question, I mean, there are discussions in that respect but the [CAF] Executive Committee will decide what kind of support will be requested from the bidders. If this is [in the] interest of Africa. For example, financing football projects somewhere.’
There was more video from the same hotel in Cairo that evening and that name Diallo kept coming up again and again. Zen-Ruffinen was having a drink in the garden with the man from Guinea, but he was reluctant to meet the lobbyists. So Zen-Ruffinen suggested that they take a stroll and ‘accidentally’ bump into him in order that he could briefly introduce them. This was the chance for Eaton to see the face of the mysterious fixer on his computer screen. Diallo shunned the limelight and there were no photographs of him on the internet. Very little was known about him publicly, except that he had worked for Bin Hammam on FIFA’s Goal Bureau. Eaton followed the camera as it made its way through the Marriott Hotel’s ornate Islamic arches into the dimly lamp-lit garden. It continued past the giant cylindrical topiary bushes to a small outside bar area, then stopped. Zen-Ruffinen’s voice was loud and clear. ‘Hello, how are you? This is Diallo,’ he said. For a split second Diallo’s face appeared in the corner of the screen. But it was too quick and the film was too grainy in the evening gloom. No matter how many times Eaton rewound it, it was impossible to get a proper view.
Later, Zen-Ruffinen reported back that Diallo had agreed to help the Americans. ‘He said that once he has the reactions, and provided they are all, let’s say, in principle ready to accept something, then we would have to define how to proceed,’ he told them. He claimed there were many people working behind the scenes in the same way as the lobbyists: ‘The key is that everybody knows how it works but nobody should have the proof that this has been worked like that.’ A series of telephone calls followed about Diallo’s progress. The negotiations went slowly because Diallo had become suspicious after learning that the lobbyists were speaking to the voters themselves. In one of his last recorded conversations, Zen-Ruffinen was heard to say that an unnamed figure from Qatar was claiming to have secured several votes. ‘If he says “secured”, it means that half of them have been bought,’ he said.
It had become a drama of many parts. The sub-plot in the Cairo garden on the banks of the Nile had brought together Bin Hammam’s elusive fixer, the reporters pretending to be lobbyists and FIFA’s ‘Mr Clean’, who had once again allowed himself to be mired in his former employers’ compost heap. So where was Bin Hammam as these events unfolded? He had been there too, but one step ahead of everyone else, as usual – leaving no trace of his visit for Eaton to find. On 15 September, the day before the lobbyists taped Hayatou at CAF’s headquarters, Bin Hammam and Meshadi were in the very same office. Fresh from sealing the collusion deal with Spain, the Qataris had brought their new ally, Ángel María Villar Llona, to meet the chief of African football. But there were no tape recorders running in this secret meeting, so FIFA’s investigator remained blissfully unaware that it had taken place.
Of course, Diallo’s flirtation with the Americans had not been what it seemed. He only ever had one master, Bin Hammam, who had been in the background pulling the strings in Cairo on the night that the Guinean fixer was first approached by Zen-Ruffinen. If the Americans wished to give away their strategy and leave all the approaches to the African voters to Diallo, more fool them. It worked perfectly for the greater purpose: a Qatar World Cup. Diallo would dutifully report back any intelligence to the boss. However, there was one bloated fly in the ointment in the hotel garden that very same evening: the clumsy and avaricious Amos Adamu.
The week of the Nigerian voter’s spectacular downfall in October, Bin Hammam had been away in China on AFC business. It caught him by surprise. Everything had been going so perfectly until The Sunday Times sent the letter to FIFA setting out the explosive collusion allegations and giving details of their encounter with Adamu.
As was his lofty habit, the man with the pink Park View mansion had been late for his appointment with lobbyists in the same Cairo hotel on the evening of 15 September. When he arrived, he took them out into the garden and found a quiet place behind the topiary. It was a swift exchange as the basic terms of the deal had already been discussed at an earlier meeting in London the previous month.
At the time, the USA was bidding for both the 2018 and 2022 tournaments. Adamu agreed to give his 2018 vote to the Americans and in return he would accept a payment of $400,000 before the ballot and $400,000 afterwards. The money was ostensibly to pay for artificial football pitches in Nigeria, but Adamu wanted it paid into his personal bank account rather than to his football federation. He believed he had been careful as he talked through the illicit deal. To give the transaction the cloak of respectability, he made it clear that money should not be seen ‘as a precondition for voting’. However, this was exactly what the deal was. Adamu was also happy to pledge that he would give his second-round vote to the USA for 2022, but he could not give his first. ‘I’ve already given my word to some other bid,’ he said. He later admitted that the ‘other bid’ was Qatar.
When the recording of the encounter arrived at FIFA headquarters on 19 October, Adamu was suspended immediately. He wrote to FIFA protesting his innocence, forwarding the letter to Bin Hammam, but the Qatari knew Adamu was finished, and that meant he was one vote down. It was a real blow to the solid core of support he had built so carefully in Africa. Everything had been going so beautifully, but now it seemed all his hopes were in jeopardy.
Bin Hammam was entering the eye of the storm when he travelled to Zurich for the biannual summit of the executive committee on Friday 29 October. The meeting of FIFA’s rulers was sure to be a volatile affair. The old guard, led by Grondona, were spitting mad that the Exco’s honour had been so impugned and questioned why Blatter had not adopted the usual strategy of retreating to the ramparts and refusing to entertain these outrageous allegations. Bin Hammam would join in the condemnation, because he needed his colleagues’ support for a more important matter. Eaton’s investigation into collusion was still ongoing and it was scheduled to be discussed during the executive committee meeting. That would mean Bin Hammam and his new ally Villar Llona would be put on the spot. They would have to deny categorically that any deal had taken place.
Ahead of the meeting, Chirakal emailed FIFA’s finance office to say that Bin Hammam’s chauffeur would be dropping by as usual to pick up $20,000 in cash. When the committee met in its Dr Strangelove-style underground bunker, the two empty seats of Adamu and Temarii further inflamed tempers. Bin Hammam sat apart from Villar Llona to avoid the appearance of being too close in this of all meetings. Several of their colleagues were between them, including the bulky figure of Chuck Blazer. The members had a brief discussion about the collusion allegations but this was swiftly passed over. The Exco was more angry about the messenger than the message. Valcke pacified the men, assuring them that there was no concrete evidence of collusion, even though Eaton had only been on the case for ten days and had not even spoken to the Qatar bid.
Villar Llona could not contain his delight that the secretary general was so dismissive of the allegations. When the discussion moved on to another topic, the triumphant Spaniard scribbled a note which read ‘Congratulations, vamos a ganar’. He folded up the scrap of paper and handed it to his nearest colleague, requesting that he pass it down the line to Bin Hammam. Maybe Villar Llona had forgotten that the man bulging out of the chair next to his Qatari ally, Blazer, spoke fluent Spanish. Bin Hammam was bemused by the note when it reached him, and leant across to Blazer to ask him to translate. The American reached for his reading glasses, and scanned the scrap of paper. Then he looked up with a raised eyebrow. ‘It says “Congratulations, we are going to win,”’ he drawled. Bin Hammam winced. His neighbour, after all, was supporting the rival United States 2022 bid. As soon as the meeting wound up, Blazer ambled up to a friendly reporter at the Associated Press and blabbed about what he had read. ‘I don’t think it was the time or place. I think Mohamed was slightly embarrassed,’ he whispered. ‘It’s the type of thing that shouldn’t have happened but nothing more than that.’
When the story broke, the world read it as confirmation that the deal between Qatar and Spain was back on, if there had ever been any doubt. It was yet another cock-up, but Bin Hammam had no time to stop and reflect on the damage. Straight after the meeting, he and Hany Abo Rida boarded the private jet that would carry them to Moscow for their meeting at the Kremlin.
Eaton was carrying on regardless. Even as the executive committee was discussing the collusion deal, he was in his office on the floor above emailing Ali Al-Thawadi, who had not responded to any correspondence since his investigation had started. He was bristling with frustration as he typed. ‘I do not seem to have a response from you or your Committee to my emails (copied below),’ he wrote. ‘As I am sure you are aware, the Ethics Committee enquiry is ongoing. While for the present there is no need for me to speak directly with you or your representatives, my independent investigation is also ongoing.’
Eaton added that he would be in Doha from the following Monday for a few days as a delegate at the Interpol general assembly, which was being held in the city. It was the perfect opportunity for the Qataris to meet him and answer the collusion allegations. But there were other things in store for FIFA’s investigator when he got to Doha: the trip was to be the beginning of a glittering new opportunity. While attending the general assembly, Eaton was invited to meet Sheikh Abdullah bin Nasser Bin Khalifa Al Thani, a member of the ruling family and Qatar’s interior minister, who was destined to become the prime minister.
Sheikh Abdullah was keen to discuss his idea of setting up an international centre for sports security in Doha to investigate serious integrity issues – such as corruption in the bidding process for the hosting of sporting tournaments. ‘At the meeting Sheikh Abdullah raised the possibility of Qatar developing an International Centre for Sports Security,’ Eaton recalled later in an email to a friend. He was receptive to the idea. ‘I said to him at the time that not only was this an interesting proposal generally, but that should Qatar win the bid for 2022, that on behalf of FIFA I would do my best to promote the concept widely. A specific Academy dedicated to Sports Security professionals is crucial at this time in my opinion.’
Such a centre would surely require a top-notch sports investigator who, since it was Qatar, would have a multi-million-pound budget at their disposal. When the plan got up and running, that was where Eaton would come in. It was a curious coincidence that Sheikh Abdullah had sought to sound out FIFA’s investigator about the venture at the very time he was investigating the Qatar bid. Furthermore, Eaton also had a friendly tête-à-tête with Hassan Al-Thawadi at the Four Seasons Hotel while he was in Doha. It was good to have cordial relations with the men from the Gulf state, even if they were refusing to cooperate with his inquiry, and it was to pay off handsomely a year later when Eaton would land a big new job in Doha.30
Days after returning from Qatar, his investigation into Bin Hammam’s deal with Villar Llona was quietly shelved. The Qatar bid committee did eventually respond to FIFA about the collusion allegation. It wrote to complain that FIFA had overstepped its own rules by bringing in Eaton when the matter should have been dealt with by its ethics committee alone. Claudio Sulser, the ethics committee chairman, announced a week later that FIFA was closing its file on collusion. ‘We didn’t find sufficient grounds to reach the conclusion there was any collusion, therefore we didn’t move forward on that case,’ said Sulser. ‘Obviously, it’s harder to prove collusion even though doubts may always arise.’ FIFA had reverted to type. It scapegoated a few individuals, and then shut the door on any further investigation into the wider allegations from the video. The consultants who had been caught being so indiscreet on camera were given suspensions, mostly for breaking the rules by talking out of turn about things they had no business discussing with strangers. The World Cup ballot would have to go ahead with only 22 voters, because Adamu and Temarii were banned from football after being caught discussing the sale of their votes. The goalposts had been shifted and Bin Hammam would have to adapt.