Billionaire Lowy hires another Bagman
By Andrew Jennings
Monday February 22, 2010
Patriotic Ms Nicole Kidman is the glamorous face of billionaire Frank Lowy’s bid to bring the World Cup to Australia. It is unlikely she’s been told that in the shadows the secret driving force of the bid is German fixer Fedor Radmann, veteran of many sports scandals in Europe. Herr Radmann has joined forces with Peter Hargitay, Swiss conman, debt-dodger and media manipulator to pocket millions of Australian tax dollars in what looks like an increasingly doomed bid.
FIRST to wake up to the cuckoo in the Aussie nest was reporter Matt Hall in the Sydney Morning Herald on October 18, 2009.
Conman Peter Hargitay demanded that this article - which he denounced as ‘a twisting of facts to satisfy a desire for salacious reporting’ and full of ‘hearsay, rumour and half-truths’ – be removed from the paper’s website. It is still there.
Coincidentally the SMH on the same day published a kind review of Foul!
So-called beautiful game has its ugly side exposed
What a splendid newspaper!
NEXT into action, three days later on October 21 2009, was Davidde Corran writing for popular Aussie sports website The Roar.
What cost are we willing to pay for a World Cup?
The author pondered whether Aussie tax dollars should be spent on Hargitay.
The story was followed up by the online appearance of the hilarious, and previously unknown ‘Joey Gaetani’ (he claimed to live in Australia but the server he wrote from was traced to England) who contributed a comment decorated with loony-toons insults identical to the ones sent to the SMH.
‘Joey’ seemed to be very knowledgeable about Hargitay – but his ‘facts’ were unreliable. ‘Joey’ insisted that Hargitay had quit working for Union Carbide two weeks after the Bhopal disaster because he didn’t like the assignment.
If ‘Joey’ had googled his mate he would have discovered on page 75 of
‘States of Emergency’ Hargitay contributing a chapter boasting about his media-manipulation for the company for the following 12 months.
Bidding Wars
The prestigious Australian Financial Review Magazine published a thorough examination of the 2018/22 bid in its February edition – plus the disclosure that Australian lobbying firms have been sidelined while taxpayers’ money has been gifted to murky foreigners.
Note the risible comment by FFA chief executive Ben Buckley that bids will be ‘completely above board.’ Buckley demonstrates a unique faith in FIFA’s Ethics Committee that isn’t shared by anybody outside Blatter’s Zurich office. Will Mr Buckley be told what game bagman Fedor Radmann is playing in the shadows?
In case readers missed the point, the AFR news pages also carried more on Hargitay’s background.
Peter’s is bigger than mine – or yours
In late October 2009 The Australian commissioned a profile of Peter Hargitay. It was written and filed together with masses of documents for their lawyers, justifying every allegation. They declined to publish – citing legal reasons. However, they have since paid a very fair fee.