Blatter & Havelange named in Swiss
bribes trial
The Indictment says that most of the money came from the Brazilian Globo TV network, was an advance payment for World Cup rights and that 75% should have been sent to FIFA. The ISL Six are said to have withheld the money because the company was strapped for cash. Then they went bust and it became, allegedly, a crime.
Monsieur Beauvois tells me during a coffee break that the allegation is ‘Fucking nonsense,’ the money was definitely a loan, none of FIFA’s business. That’s up to the lovely Carole and her two male escorts to decide. She tilts her head attentively, atop her long, elegant neck, stretches her legs and crosses her ankles. Each of the six defence lawyers make their points.
Seated next to Beauvois is The Man Who Knew Nothing and got the CEO’s job Because he Married the Boss’s Sister. Seemed a great idea 18 years ago for McKinsey-trained Christoph Malms to entwine with one of Horst Dassler’s family. When they split he got a bundle of shares and this figurehead job. The Dassler family also owned Adidas but after Horst died young in 1987, sold it for a pittance to a French conman.
Herr Malms, dark brown hair, dark face, middle height and of course a dark suit, leans forward into his microphone, showing his small bald patch. He can’t do enough to please. He responds earnestly to every question but doesn’t have any answers. We expect a verdict in July, about the time of his 53rd birthday.
Next to Malms and close to the centre of the room is ISL’s former top bean counter Hans-Jurg Schmid. He’s questioned vigorously by the judge sitting on Carole’s left. It’s Zug’s way. There’s no acid-tongued prosecuting barrister, ripping the accused to shreds. Judge Marc Siegwart wears no wig or gown, just a suit, Van Dyke beard twitching as the ramblings from the accused become more unbelievable. When he gets exasperated, Marc’s eyes grow larger and rounder behind his spectacles.
Tomorrow we’ll see Marc at his most lethal – but as we move towards the 6pm close of play he’s warming up, leading the Six through another 15 million francs on the embezzlement part of the Indictment. Again – a loan or a stage payment on TV rights? The money was from Japan’s Dentsu, the biggest advertising company in the world who also acquired World Cup rights from ISL for resale in Asia.
As ISL teetered in late 2000, Dentsu sent money from East to West. Days later a slice of that money from an ISL Black Bag yo-yoed back down that route. Even as creditors clamoured for their money, four million Swiss francs – around £2 million - went to the Gilmark Holdings account, said to be in Hong Kong. Judge Siegwart obviously knew more than he was letting on when he went along the defendants’ desks, asking them one by one what they could tell him about Gilmark. They felt unable to assist him.
(Ten days passed and Jean-Francois Tanda, an enterprising reporter at Zurich’s Sonntag Zeitung with some the best sources in the business disclosed that the money went to a senior manager at Dentsu – a Mr Gilmark Hara Yuki Takahashi. Tanda has tried and I have too but the Dentsu mouthpiece in Tokyo isn’t responding to emails)
The Dentsu company has done business with FIFA for more than two decades. They still do. Although the ISL company has evaporated, their gleaming white offices 100 metres from the court now house the InFront sports marketing company. InFront has won, with Dentsu, a big chunk of television rights to the next World Cup. The name of the InFront CEO has a familiar ring. Philippe Blatter. What do uncle and nephew talk about when not doing deals with the most sought-after football rights in the world?
Judge Carole closed the court at 5.59.
Blatter’s pugnacious personal spindoctor Peter Hargitay has been calling reporters across Europe the last few days assuring them that the FIFA president is ‘relaxed’ about the Zug hearings. Not worth turning up, nothing interesting will happen in court. Total waste of time.
One London paper repeated the line. They didn’t see Blatter on Swiss TV the next night, after this stage of the trial ended. Pale and drawn, stress creased Blatter’s face when a reporter stuck corruption questions to him. But Blatter knew exactly what was going on because the anonymous young man taking notes in the Zug court was a junior lawyer from his solicitors in Zurich.