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The Autumn of Football’s Patriarch
IT’S BEEN a dozen years of scandal since Patriarch was ennobled on the eve of the French World Cup. He was helped to power promising every national franchise big bundles of dollars every year. He knew the money wasn’t in the bank and future earnings were hurriedly pawned at a knockdown price. Swiss KPMG wrote him the audit report he wanted. Simultaneously, Enron, advised by McKinsey, were going bust. Dots screamed to be joined up – but weren’t. He survived.
Patriarchs don’t get to be Patriarchs without immense reserves of inner strength, wiliness – and luck. From late 2000 he knew, privately, that the marketing company that bribed a generation of sports officials was heading for that high brick wall, the optional blindfold and the last cigarette. Inevitably, the cops would be in. He might be the shortest-lived Patriarch in history.
He lied, he diverted, he fantasised and the smartly dressed Notebooks wrote down his ramblings unquestioningly and the world was reassured. The executives who created the offshore accounts to warehouse the bribes were summoned to court in the canton of Zug and we discovered Patriarch had secretly lobbied the cops to halt investigations. He failed but with the exception of one courageous German-language Swiss TV channel, the Notebooks obliged and didn’t print.
LYING TO THE COPS
Three Swiss judges fined Patriarch for lying to the cops but the Notebooks found it incomprehensible and strangled the story at birth. The judges named an old rogue who runs the Paraguay franchise for trousering bribes, even produced the documentary evidence, it was posted on the web but Patriarch told the Notebooks he didn’t want to talk about it and they broke into applause.
Patriarch’s Nephew watched from his high office window 100 yards from the courthouse. His sports business had made its home in the same offices as the outfit that had paid the bribes and soon documents were liberated showing its game is change the name and do the same. The art of laundering kickbacks thrives.
Patriarch’s heart fluttered when they arrived just after 10 on the morning of November 3, 2005. He’d heard on the grapevine that pushy investigating magistrate Thomas Hildbrand in Zug had opened a new investigation . . . into him! Patriarch! Patriarchs think themselves untouchable, especially by coppers from faraway cantons. And the Zurich politicians would surely never dare consent to a cross-border raid.
It took two weeks before an astute reporter at Zurich’s Sonntags Zeitung got the tip-off. When he called the Palace, a guard portrayed it as a happy meeting of minds, a leisurely kaffee und kuchen, and that some of the documents, only borrowed, might have been returned. But the guard let slip enough for the reporter to figure out that under the Swiss penal code, the cops believed Patriarch had been dipping into the treasury. Some of the kickbacks to Patriarch’s closest lieutenants had been repaid, surreptitiously, and the coppers had got documents showing Patriarch had signed off on it.
HEAVY LEGAL BILLS
Patriarchs get a better press than presidents and prime ministers. A fraud squad raid on Downing Street, Elysée or White House would clog media arteries for months. The Notebooks, alternatively cowed or unable to comprehend what had happened, preferred to look away.
The ignominy of the raid and the continuing attentions of the coppers is airbrushed out of today’s carefully constructed obituary. Our Egyptian reporter in Zurich isn’t pressing the point that Patriarch hangs on to his position because the sport pays the heavy legal bills for protecting his reputation. She may not know but that’s good because today we only want to hear his obituary, in his own words. Then we can know it’s nearly time to make the plates for the big printing presses.