Blatter & Havelange named in Swiss
bribes trial
Jennings couldn’t make it for the second round of hearings – and missed the biggest FIFA corruption story of all time! Fortunately, his friends were there with their notebooks and now, for the first time, the shocking truth revealed in the Zug courtroom makes it into the English language.
Monday March 31, 2008: Back in court, it’s the turn of the defence lawyers to rubbish the prosecution case. The hearing lasts for most of the week. In occasional spasms it’s payback time, could it be that sport is taking its revenge on the bastards who lied in their faces for decades and stole the money. And we’re not talking marketing executives here.
The second grenade was tossed into the courtroom by Herr Werner Würgler, the lawyer for Christoph Malms. While his client really, really, honestly didn’t have proof of who got the kickbacks, he had been given two huge clues. Herr Würgler claimed that FIFA President Sepp Blatter had approached Christoph Malms and told him in no uncertain terms that if ISL wanted to keep FIFA’s business, Jean-Marie Weber had to keep his job at the company. If not, ‘It would be bad for ISL.’
Making sure that Jean-Marie, the man who delivered FIFA’s bribes, kept his job at ISL seemed to be a priority for FIFA presidents because, according to Herr Würgler’s speech to the judges, during the World Cup in France in 1998, President Havelange had made the same demand.
Würgler added that, ‘because of these ultimatums made by the two FIFA presidents, ‘it was made economically impossible for the ISL Group to move away from the system of commission payments.’
(Commissions? We thought they were bribes. Calling the kickbacks ‘commissions’ made the ISL guys feel better about themselves.)
Würgler hadn’t finished with Blatter. The lawyer rammed home the point that anybody at FIFA who knew about the bribes – and who was getting them – could exercise great power over fellow officials. And in case the judges hadn’t yet got the point, the ISL company had become a private source of money for FIFA – virtually their private bank.
Judge Marc Siegwart gave Jean-Marie one last chance to cough the names. ‘No,’ he says, ‘I make no statement.’ But his lips were dry, he’s lost weight since the trial started and a strong wind might break him into parts.
Re-reading them, the final defence arguments suddenly make sense. It was FIFA’s fault we went bust say the Big Six. The bribes sucked the lifeblood out of the company. FIFA's deliberate decision to pull out of an agreed joint rescue package buried them.
And Daniel Beauvois had an explanation. ‘If we failed, it was not due to a lack of ability but because our main business partners did all that they could to make sure we did not survive, allowing another company with FIFA at its head to take over our operations.’
Beauvois was referring to the in-house FIFA Marketing company, set up early in 2001 with Blatter as chairman, as ISL tottered.
That was it! Bells rang. Years earlier I’d listened, enthralled, to a man with intimate knowledge of ISL explaining how and why the era of bribes from ISL had come to a natural end.
‘There was always the risk of getting caught,’ he explained. ‘Then the blazers running the sports federations started taking the marketing business in-house. That way instead of taking risky bribes from outsiders, they could pay themselves bonuses out of federation funds for the work done by the guys in their marketing department and nobody could touch them.’
Could this be the explanation for Blatter’s panic in March 2003 when I published a story revealing he paid himself a secret six-figure bonus? He announced immediately that he would sue me and I since then I’ve been banned from all FIFA property and press conferences. If I go near FIFA HQ with a TV crew, he puts guards on the doors to keep me out. He didn’t sue.
It’s depressing that no FIFA officials, no football leader, no national association knows what he pays himself – and none dare ask.
Next: [On to the verdict]