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Billionaire Lowy hires another Bagman
By Andrew Jennings
Monday February 22, 2010
Gabby Ben Buckley let slip the name to an English reporter visiting Sydney. It didn’t mean much to the reporter but he gave it a casual mention in his column a couple of weeks before Christmas. It was so far down the page that few in faraway England thought anything of it.
Had the reporter been from southern Germany the giggles beginning in Bavaria would soon have gusted across the land all the way to the Berlin Bundestag. They will now. Fedor Radmann! Working for an ageing billionaire who wants the World Cup? He-he. Wouldn’t be the first time! Ho-ho. And last time there was enough trouble to last anyone else a lifetime!
But what did Fedor’s latest billionaire, the Australian shopping mall impresario Frank Lowy, who talks up his plans to stage the World Cup, know about him? You’d think that a businessman who has purchased properties and malls from New Zealand to New York and builds his own in East and West London would for sure have done due diligence on the self-styled Mr Fixit of the world game.
Other bidders in the past have used corporate delvers Kroll International to dig the FIFA dirt. Or there’s that odd little outfit ABI Eavesdroppers in Zurich’s Lavaterstrasse.
Fedor’s Football Scandals
The first thing his investigators would have told Mr Lowy is that Herr Radmann is well-known in Germany and Switzerland, his name cropping up in endless football-related scandals. If they did tell him, it seems to have confirmed Fedor in the job.
It was in Zurich a year ago that it became obvious that funny Fedor was now kissing cousins with fearless Frank. Fedor was waiting for his new client in the lobby of the oh-so plush Bauer au Lac hotel near the lake shore and passing the time telling some FIFA blazers that he, a pensioner, had just fathered a son with his lovely Michaela.
Suddenly this happy group was bashed apart by the abrupt intervention of pushy PA Patricia. He will see you now, she told Fedor and indeed there was diminutive Frank beaming fondly under his snowy hair at the new father. What did the football officials think?
Let the Good Times Roll!
Since then they’ve been entertained on Frank’s vast yacht – it upstages Oligarchs – and flattered Frank with a seat on their toothless committee nominally organising this year’s football extravaganza in South Africa.
But Frank wants a lot more and so it will have been the due diligence reports listing the unique services offered by Funny Fedor and his sidekick Immaculate Andreas Abold whose wardrobe may have cost more than Frank’s ocean liner that clinched it.
Since then Fedor’s been seen carrying the Australian flag from Nassau to Cape Town, Zurich to Cairo, everywhere football’s tight little group of decision-makers will allow you to buy them a drink.
Meet the Tricksters
Nobody’s quite sure what Fedor does so well – it’s nobody’s business - but whatever it is, he learned everything from the Master. Thirty years ago Horst Dassler made him head of the Adidas International Relations Team – aka the Department of Dirty Tricks & Votes Fixing - and Fedor’s career has gone downhill, subterranean, into places you wouldn’t want your children marooned in. He must have developed night vision eyeballs because whatever Fedor does, he does it in the dark.
Ah, the Tricksters, a legend in their time, those still alive now scattered around the globe hawking their special services as ‘consultants.’ I had one of them round to tea in my West London apartment 18 years ago and filmed him for a documentary about the then unknown jackbooting life of the Olympic boss of bosses.
As a reporter, I was most fond of the bizarre Anwar Chowdhry from Sunnyside Villas in Karachi who summoned me to interview him and his unbuttoned pyjamas and rolls of bypass scars one afternoon in a tenth-floor Houston suite even as he was thieving millions from the international amateur boxing federation. Yes, Fedor’s worked with them all. One of them, he was the baby at the time, intends to be elected the next figurehead of the International Olympic Committee. Fedor will be there, if he needs help.