England’s secret file on ‘Russia and Qatar World Cup vote-fixing’ Published: 30 November 2014 THE SUNDAY TIMES ALLEGATIONS of vote-buying by the winning Russian and Qatari World Cup campaigns are contained in a secret database lying in the vaults of the England 2018 bid. The existence of the database and some of its allegations are revealed in a dossier compiled by The Sunday Times that has been submitted to a House of Commons committee, at its request, and which was published yesterday. Officials from England’s World Cup bid gathered detailed information from ex- MI6 agents hired to spy on its rivals and British embassies around the world, according to the dossier. Their intelligence database contained “incendiary” claims that Qatar and Russia were suspected of using their vast sovereign wealth to seal key support and that the two countries were thought to have swapped votes in a “collusion” pact brokered through a massive bilateral gas deal. The Commons culture, media and sport committee published the dossier yesterday after receiving it from The Sunday Times in response to a fresh inquiry into alleged corruption in the World Cup bidding race. Well-placed sources close to the England bid’s intelligence-gathering operation told The Sunday Times that its database on rival bids included unproven allegations that: •The winning Qatari and Russian bids were suspected of trading votes in a deal alleged to have been brokered through a huge joint gas extraction project in Siberia’s Yamal Peninsula. Vladimir Putin and the then emir discussed the deal days after Qatar’s top football official, Mohamed bin Hammam, had visited the Kremlin to discuss “bilateral relations” in sport a month before the World Cup ballot. •Qatar was believed to have “bought” the vote of the Thai executive committee (Exco) member Worawi Makudi through investments in his holiday resort companies. Makudi declined to comment. •The Gulf state’s sovereign wealth fund was suspected of sealing the support of the Cypriot voter Marios Lefkaritis with a £27m land deal. Lefkaritis said his vote was not influenced. •The vote of the former World Cup winner Franz Beckenbauer was allegedly touted for sale by two associates who asked bidding countries for consultancy fees of millions of pounds in return. Beckenbauer said he could not comment because he was under investigation by Fifa over his conduct in the bidding contest. He has previously denied any wrongdoing. •Russia was suspected of having raided the vaults of State Hermitage Museum or the Kremlin archives to give expensive paintings to key voters. Michel D’Hooghe, the Belgian voter, has acknowledged receiving a landscape painting from an adviser to the country’s 2018 bid but says he thought it was “absolutely ugly” and valueless. The dossier also reveals that the England bid team was in breach of Fifa’s rules by agreeing to a vote-swap between their own voter and the representative for South Korea’s 2022 World Cup campaign on the eve of the secret ballot. The disclosures come amid the worst crisis in Fifa’s history over the botched internal investigation that this month cleared Qatar and Russia of wrongdoing. The organisation’s investigator disowned a 42-page summary of his work soon after it was published by Fifa, labelling it “materially incomplete and erroneous”. Fifa has stonewalled calls to publish the Garcia report in full, but the revelation that England has secret World Cup intelligence will fuel demands for full disclosure of all his evidence. The officials from England’s defunct World Cup bid will come under scrutiny over their decision to withhold their intelligence from a previous parliamentary inquiry, as well as their vote-swapping agreement with South Korea. The intelligence was not shared with an independent review commissioned by the Football Association (FA) and a parliamentary inquiry into football governance, both of which requested evidence of corruption in the bidding contest the year after the vote. England’s bid bosses signed sworn statements that they were not aware of any evidence “which implicates members of Fifa . . . with being involved in any corrupt activity in relation to the Fifa World Cup bidding process” during the FA’s review by James Dingemans QC. John Whittingdale, chairman of the culture, media and sport committee, said he had “very serious” questions and intended to write to bid officials asking them to hand over the database to parliament. “I’m very concerned about these allegations both about the existence of this report, which was never made available to us, and also the that the bid team may have broken the rules by making a collusion deal, and I will be seeking a response from the bid team on all these points,” he said. Senior sources from the bid have told The Sunday Times that they kept quiet about their database because it contained unproven allegations and they feared legal reprisals from the individuals named within it. They said they did not volunteer any intelligence about corruption to Garcia because Fifa refused to offer witnesses any protection against the threat of legal action from individuals implicated by their evidence, and they were concerned about protecting their sources and breaching non-disclosure agreements. One senior bid official said: “I have a family that I am the complete breadwinner for . . . and I can’t afford, in order to help Fifa get themselves out of a mess on a corrupt process, to expose myself to legal action . . . [I gave] factual, correct, transparent answers to any questions [I was asked].” The FA said yesterday the England bid engaged with a number of parties around the world to provide information on the progress of the bidding process within different countries: “These were media and corporate affairs consultants engaged on a confidential basis to gather intelligence. The fact the bid team had taken advice on intelligence-gathering was referenced to Mr Garcia as part of the investigative process. The FA . . . has fully complied with all disclosure requests made by Mr Garcia.” A bid source said they had given Garcia access to their servers where the encrypted database was stored.
Posted on: Sun, 30 Nov 2014 23:07:32 +0000
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