World Cup tickets keep the boys loyal

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British investigative journalist Andrew Jennings, delves into the scandals surrounding FIFA, in his new book Faoul! and a new BBC documentary, and Just in time for the beginning of the World Cup.

The book, The Secret World of FIFA: Bribes, Vote Rigging and Ticket Scandals, deals in the collapse of FIFA’s marketing partner, ISL/ISMM, which went bankrupt in 2001 with losses of more than USD300 million (SFr364 million).

Jennings, who has previously written a book on corruption within the Olympic movement, also makes allegations of vote-rigging during FIFA’s internal elections.

As part of an interview with the Australian Broadcasting Authority and reporter Mark Colvin, Jennings explained he started his search for FIFA’s troubles in 2000, and meticulously spent many years tracking down the story.

“I was aware of FIFA,” Jennings told the broadcasting outlet, “and I was aware of a lot of the rumours of bribery, and of course over the years as I looked at the International Olympic Committee, inevitably I was looking also at a sports marketing company called International Sport and Leisure, which we all know as ISL, who'd somehow gained, without any tendering, the exclusive marketing and television contracts for the Olympic Games, the World Track and Field Championships, and the Soccer World Cup.”

“Late 2000, I get tipped off from Switzerland that this marketing company, ISL, was on its way to bankruptcy, it was death agonies might take a few months, but the banks were going to pull the plug,” Jennings said.

“Now that became fascinating. Because late at night when I've sat with Australian colleagues in the bar, English colleagues, German colleagues, French colleagues, we've talked about who got the buns. There was never any doubt in our mind that buns were being paid for these contracts, but of course you don't get the evidence.”

Jennings said the bribes were getting so large that they had to be hidden on the balance sheet.

“As soon as the ISL company started to slide,” Jennings said, “I knew that if it did go down, all the documents, all the bank records, would go into the hands of an independent liquidator, an auditor, an accountant, someone who's got no interest in the politics, but would be very interested to look at where the money had gone.”

The breakthrough, Jennings said, came in July of 2001. He attended a creditors’ meeting of the ISL and simply inquired about any bribes, kickbacks and scandals.
Jennings was told there was evidence. There were receipts totalling more than GBP 400,000. “The investigation started to go from there,” Jennings said.

This, of course, has earned Jennings the enmity of FIFA president Sepp Blatter and his cronies. “We're talking about the people around him and around the previous president, Joao Havelange,” Jennings said.

Blatter came under fire at the time for not moving quickly enough to avert the financial disaster. Blatter, also faced similar accusations in 2002 from 11 former members of his own executive committee in the run-up to his re-election for a second term as FIFA president. A Zurich court however, cleared Blatter in December that year, of corruption and mismanagement, after finding no evidence to support the claims.

“What's become clear, and this is in the last chapter of Foul!, of my book, is that it's not just any longer my journalistic inquiries, because what I've discovered in secretive Switzerland is that as I've been digging away, the investigating magistrate, we're calling him the ‘untouchable’ in our film because Mr. Thomas Hildbrand of the city of Zug is a man who doesn't mess about with crooks, he's already indicted in May last year, as I say in the book, five or six senior executives of ISL for some very dirty dealings with FIFA.”

November 3 of last year, Hildbrand, a magistrate, led a raiding group of fraud squad detectives on FIFA house.

“He went in with a warrant to search the offices of Sepp Blatter and his General Secretary Urs Linsi and he seized documents,” Jennings said. “If the indictments at FIFA follow in the next few months, as is very likely, then there's going to be a massive change at the top of world football, absolutely massive change, 'cause the cops are in, not just the journalists.”

The wrongdoings went up the chain of FIFA, and the flaws were perfectly illustrated earlier this year when all tickets for Trinidad & Tobago World Cup matches were allocated to a travel company owned by Jack Warner, a FIFA vice-president and advisor to the Trinidad & Tobago Football Federation. FIFA’s in-house ethics committee referred the matter to the executive committee, which cleared Warner after he revealed that his family had relinquished its interests in the firm.

“One of the biggest rackets inside FIFA is the sports blazers, the officials getting their allocations of football World Cup tickets, and then of course being able to sell them on the street or pass them on to touts, or middlemen,” Jennings said.

“This keeps the boys loyal, it's a little bit of extra bun, a bit of bunch they can make up some money on the side, tax-free, by selling tickets.

“So if you're an Australian fan, or any nationality of fan, in Germany this year and you get offered a ticket on the street, then you must know it could only have come from the back door of FIFA.

“Sepp Blatter said in the past ‘oh, we will have investigations,’ and pigs will fly because he's going to be investigating his own people, the people who support him. So it'll never happen.”