For more than a decade Andrew Jennings has been telling anybody who would listen that the sports marketing company ISL paid industrial-scale bungs to the men who control world sport. In March 2008 he travelled to a criminal court in Switzerland to hear prosecutors reveal it was even worse than he’d imagined.
Tuesday March 11, 2008, Zug: Here they come, pretending it’s just an ordinary day, past the hyenas hovering in the glass and brick canyon leading to the court door, nod to familiar faces, sorry can’t stop to chat, daren’t be late.
Up until the dawning of this century it was so different. The Big Six happily gave us interviews, smiled for our cameras, catered the vol-au-vents and waved releases announcing New Clients! New Sports! Global Domination!
The Prosecutor here in the small Swiss City of Zug is demanding up to four-and-a-half years in jail for what’s becoming the biggest corruption scandal in sport. When International Sport and Leisure – always known as ISL - went down the toilet in the Spring of 2001 they owed more than $300 million, the second largest bankruptcy in Swiss history.
Their biggest and best contract was the marketing and television rights to the World Cup in 2002 and again in 2006. It cost them $1.2 billion to buy from FIFA but they could sell for lots more – and take 25% commissions on the way. How could such fantastically clever business whizzes go wrong? Where did the money go? By the end of today we should be getting some clues.
The square courtroom is the first surprise. It could be a conference room for salesmen in a no-frills business motel. At best it’s down-market Swedish, designed by the guy who trucked in the ready-mix. No podium, all of us on one level. And that’s hardwearing, composite flooring. The tall, lithe and quite lovely figure of 41-year-old blonde Presiding Judge Ziegler in her dark pant-suit (‘I’m Carole, spelled like the French,’ she purrs to me in a coffee break) sits flanked by her two middle-aged male colleagues at a table against the back wall.
There’s more rows of tables and chairs at the back for the reporters, Swiss, Germans, French - and me from an offshore island. In front of us a dozen or so strained relatives and an attentive young man in a suit who we’ll identify later. Facing the judges the once Big Six sit squashed with their lawyers and their tables are squeezed across the whole breadth of the room.
They’ve plenty to worry about. The prosecutor wants to stiff them for embezzlement, fraud and fraudulent bankruptcy as well as damaging creditors and falsification of documents. That’s enough scandal to fill our notebooks. But we want more; we came here for bribes. Be patient.
On the far right of the line-up is Daniel Beauvoir, early 50s, living again in Brussels. With his swept-back greying hair and trim beard he’s the only one who looks creative. Daniel is lucky, he joined ISL to run their television operations long after the bribery scams were put in place. But he could still end up breakfasting on Swiss-government issue muesli because all six are accused of nicking around £45 million pounds they should have paid to FIFA. FIFA! At last Herr Blatter and his organisation get their names on the court record. It’s 11.02 on Tuesday March 11, two hours into the evidence.
The Indictment says that most of the money came from the Brazilian Globo TV network, was an advance payment for World Cup rights and that 75% should have been sent to FIFA. The ISL Six are said to have withheld the money because the company was strapped for cash. Then they went bust and it became, allegedly, a crime.
Monsieur Beauvoir tells me during a coffee break that the allegation is ‘Fucking nonsense,’ the money was definitely a loan, none of FIFA’s business. That’s up to the lovely Carole and her two male escorts to decide. She tilts her head attentively, atop her long, elegant neck, stretches her legs and crosses her ankles. Each of the six defence lawyers make their points.
Seated next to Beauvoir is The Man Who Knew Nothing and got the CEO’s job Because he Married the Boss’s Sister. Seemed a great idea 18 years ago for McKinsey-trained Christoph Malms to entwine with one of Horst Dassler’s family. When they split he got a bundle of shares and this figurehead job. The Dassler family also owned Adidas but after Horst died young in 1987, sold it for a pittance to a French conman.
Herr Malms, dark brown hair, dark face, middle height and of course a dark suit, leans forward into his microphone, showing his small bald patch. He can’t do enough to please. He responds earnestly to every question but doesn’t have any answers. We expect a verdict in July, about the time of his 53rd birthday.
Next to Malms and close to the centre of the room is ISL’s former top bean counter Hans-Jurg Schmid. He’s questioned vigorously by the judge sitting on Carole’s left. It’s Zug’s way. There’s no acid-tongued prosecuting barrister, ripping the accused to shreds. Judge Marc Siegwart wears no wig or gown, just a suit, Van Dyke beard twitching as the ramblings from the accused become more unbelievable. When he gets exasperated, Marc’s eyes grow larger and rounder behind his spectacles.
Tomorrow we’ll see Marc at his most lethal – but as we move towards the 6pm close of play he’s warming up, leading the Six through another 15 million francs on the embezzlement part of the Indictment. Again – a loan or a stage payment on TV rights? The money was from Japan’s Dentsu, the biggest advertising company in the world who also acquired World Cup rights from ISL for resale in Asia.
As ISL teetered in late 2000, Dentsu sent money from East to West. Days later a slice of that money from an ISL Black Bag yo-yoed back down that route. Even as creditors clamoured for their money, four million Swiss francs – around £2 million - went to the Gilmark Holdings account, said to be in Hong Kong. Judge Siegwart obviously knew more than he was letting on when he went along the defendants’ desks, asking them one by one what they could tell him about Gilmark. They felt unable to assist him.
(Ten days passed and Jean-Francois Tanda, an enterprising reporter at Zurich’s Sonntag Zeitung with some the best sources in the business disclosed that the money went to a senior manager at Dentsu – a Mr Gilmark Hara Yuki Takahashi. Tanda has tried and I have too but the Dentsu mouthpiece in Tokyo isn’t responding to emails).
The Dentsu company has done business with FIFA for more than two decades. They still do. Although the ISL company has evaporated, their gleaming white offices 100 metres from the court now house the InFront sports marketing company. InFront has won, with Dentsu, a big chunk of television rights to the next World Cup. The name of the InFront CEO has a familiar ring. Philippe Blatter. What do uncle and nephew talk about when not doing deals with the most sought-after football rights in the world?
Judge Carole closed the court at 5.59.
Blatter’s pugnacious personal spindoctor Peter Hargitay has been calling reporters across Europe the last few days assuring them that the FIFA president is ‘relaxed’ about the Zug hearings. Not worth turning up, nothing interesting will happen in court. Total waste of time.
One London paper repeated the line. They didn’t see Blatter on Swiss TV the next night, after this stage of the trial ended. Pale and drawn, stress creased Blatter’s face when a reporter stuck corruption questions to him. But Blatter knew exactly what was going on because the anonymous young man taking notes in the Zug court was a junior lawyer from his solicitors in Zurich.