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Did Blatter’s Mob friends fix 2018
for Russia?
Friday December 17, 2010
In January 2009 we revealed Blatter’s private partying with Russian crime boss, Olympic gold medal fixer and key member of Russia’s football elite Alimzhan ‘Alik’ Tokhtakhounov.
The significance of that story is now obvious.
But there’s more. When the English 2018 bid team fired the conman Peter Hargitay and his junior lobbying partner former FIFA media chief Marcus Siegler, the dodgy duo split up.
Siegler went to plot for the Russia 2018 bid, taking with him former FIFA press officer Andreas Herren. Hargitay was hired to manipulate for the Australian bid – and ‘devised’ their bid ‘strategy’ in partnership with his Russian allies.
Russia got it. Australia didn’t. Hargitay got Australia’s money. Siegler will have trousered a Russian bonus. Happy Christmas, drinks all round and Russia’s mobsters and crooked politicians are now eyeing the lucrative construction contacts to come.
YES, THEY DO TAKE BRIBES!
Did the English bid team know about the secret, corrupt dealings going on in the background? Yes, they did. Did that stop them squandering at least £15 million on their bid? No it didn’t.
The most important disclosure about the bidding emerged three days after the votes, the tears and the accusations. For 10 months London Mail on Sunday columnist Patrick Collins had suppressed an admission by England bid chief Andy Anson, perhaps while over-refreshed, that his team believed that more than half of FIFA’s Executive Committee could be bribed.
So when England Bid chief - and FIFA vice-president - Geoffrey Thompson wrote to his ‘dear colleagues’ on the Executive Committee two weeks before the vote, telling them ‘we naturally feel solidarity with you and your colleagues’ we have to wonder if Andy Anson hadn’t told him all he knew. Or Mr Thompson hadn’t spotted that at least half of his colleagues in Zurich had their hands out?
Something else Mr Thompson appeared not to have spotted was FIFA President Blatter’s blatant perversion of the truth about his colleagues and their lucrative involvement in the ISL $100 million contracts kickbacks scandal.
Desperate to undermine the upcoming BBC Panorama programme, Blatter announced that FIFA and the Swiss courts had dealt with the scandal. Wrong on both counts. (See script and Panorama video)
The bribes - and the FIFA bosses who took them - have never been judged by the Swiss courts. And never been investigated by FIFA’s Ethics Committee - or any other FIFA committee. That’s two indisputable facts.
Here’s another one: Blatter claims that he was cleared by a police investigation. He wasn’t. Definitely not. On the contrary, in June 2010 certain un-named FIFA bosses agreed to repay some of the bribes they had pocketed from the ISL company. Think about it. Herr Blatter has ruled out any FIFA investigation into who they were and how much they pocketed. You might wonder why.
ENGLISH FOOTBALL GROVELS
Nonetheless Mr Thomson grovelled to his FIFA colleagues about the imminent BBC Panorama, ‘We are alerting you to fact that the programme appears in part to be raking over allegations some of which are up to 10 years old and have already been formally dealt with by FIFA and the Swiss courts.’(Our italics)
Then the England bid’s pompously titled ‘Chief of Staff’ Simon Greenberg went too far. The day after the Panorama screening, and without consulting his bosses, Greenberg issued a press statement claiming that the programme was ‘an embarrassment to the BBC.’
Enough was enough: London Daily Mail executives saw this nonsense and retaliated with an editorial commentary shredding Greenberg and his loony-tunes boast. Continued...