• His investigation has meant that Lamine Diack, former president of the International Association of Athletics Federations, has been under house arrest in Paris since 2015, as part of a continuing probe into a network of corruption across sport.
• In December 2017, when Platini was first questioned by France’s specialist prosecutor for financial crimes, he had his homes at Nyon and in the Parisian suburb of Saint-Cloud extensively searched. Platini has not been charged. He is still a witness helping the police.
Image: /REUTERS
When Michel Platini arrived at the Nanterre offices of the prosecutor of France’s financial crime unit last Tuesday morning, he would have been prepared for a robust interrogation.
However, he perhaps was not expecting the full 15 hours of questioning to which the French anti-corruption police subjected him. He was finally released just after 1 am. Former France and Juventus No 10 has become used to such indignities since being forced to stand down as Uefa president in 2016 after receiving an unexplained £1.4million bonus payment from disgraced Fifa president Sepp Blatter.
In December 2017, when Platini was first questioned by France’s specialist prosecutor for financial crimes, he had his homes at Nyon and in the Parisian suburb of Saint-Cloud extensively searched. Platini has not been charged. He is still a witness helping the police.
His lawyer insisted that his client has nothing to hide and no part in a wider sports corruption investigation the French police are undertaking. Platini was given the status ‘garde a vue’, a French legal term which enables police to question you for 24 hours before release.
It sounds like Platini was treated with civility and he can count himself lucky if the accounts of past suspects of the same inquiry are anything to go by. Some sports officials in this investigation have been subjected to dawn raids by police. One fainted when cops turned up to frogmarch him out of his house, in front of his family, and into a jail cell.
Officials were locked in solitary cells and left to stew while police interviewed their colleagues, then summoned them for their own interrogation. After an intensive spell of questioning, suspects were sent back to their solitary cell, presumably to ponder what colleagues might be saying about them.
In this instance, there was no question of Platini being held in a cell. He reported to the offices early morning by appointment. But police wanted to avoid any contact between him and fellow interviewees, officials connected to the former French president Nicolas Sarkozy, so they could compare accounts of the now infamous lunch between Platini, Sarkozy and the Emir of Qatar, Sheik Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani at the Elysee Palace on November 23, 2010.
The lunch took place nine days before Platini, as a Fifa executive committee member, would vote for the 2022 World Cup to take place in Qatar. Platini insists the lunch played no part, that he had no idea Sheik Tamim, who was then the Crown Prince of Qatar, would be there and that he had rung then Fifa chief Blatter immediately afterwards to inform him.
Platini was questioned extensively on the lunch and the subsequent sale a year later of Paris Saint-Germain to Qatar Sports Investment, the sporting arm of Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund. In short, the French investigation, initiated by Parquet National Financier, which is roughly analogous to the Crown Prosecution Service combined with the Serious Fraud Office, is a heavy duty operation. In charge is the debonair Bordeaux-educated Jean-Yves Lourgouilloux, an old-school police investigator who seems to have a healthy disdain for social hierarchies and the status of once-feted sports grandees.
His investigation has meant that Lamine Diack, former president of the International Association of Athletics Federations, has been under house arrest in Paris since 2015, as part of a continuing probe into a network of corruption across sport.
Diack was forced to step down as president in 2015 when the seriousness of this investigation became clear, with doping tests covered up and cash paid to companies associated with his son, Papa.
It is not just the award of the World Cup to Qatar by Fifa which is in their sights. French police suspect several major sporting events of the past decade have been awarded due to large scale corruption within Fifa, the IAAF and the International Olympic Committee. Since the award of events under suspicion, Fifa, the IOC and IAAF have all reformed their respective selection processes, with the IOC pointing out that reforms have strengthened their rules and that a number of members involved have since resigned or been suspended.
French police were initially alerted to the murky world of sports politics when investigating the laundering of money through French bank accounts of Papa Diack, who has absconded to his native Senegal and for whom there is an international arrest warrant in place. Police allege — and a subsequent IAAF inquiry has corroborated — that Papa Diack was using his influence at the IAAF to try to slow down Russian positive doping tests.
Papa Diack was banned for life by the IAAF. The former head of IAAF anti-doping, Gabriel Dolle, and Lamine Diack are due to go on trial next year. Papa Diack and Valentin Balakhnichev, former head of the Russian athletics federation who is said to have conspired with them, may be tried in absentia. There is also an international arrest warrant for Balakhnichev, who remains in Russia.
But the money trail for those doping cover-ups led French police to something altogether more interesting, namely one of the companies involved, Black Tidings. The Singapore firm appeared to be a shell company run by an associate of Papa Diack, Ianton Tan, who has since been imprisoned for perjury.
Papa Diack’s own consultancy firm, PMD Consulting, had its domain name, pmdconsulting.com, registered at the same address as Black Tidings. While Black Tidings had few cash inflows, it had received $2m from Tokyo 2020, hosts of the next Olympics. Payments were split in two, the first $1m tranche in July 2013, two months before voting would take place at the IOC Congress on who would host the 2020 Games — a hard-fought contest between Tokyo, Istanbul and Madrid.
French police have emails of Papa urging his father that ‘we have to do more’ in the run-up to the vote. They need to establish what that meant. Le Monde has reported that Papa Diack’s emails say that another influential IOC figure was ‘doing all he can to get the Africans to vote for Madrid! We need to lock this before the pause’.
Witnesses have explained to police and independently to The Mail on Sunday that Lamine Diack was confident the result would go Tokyo’s way on the morning of the vote. Tokyo was successful and a month later a further payment of $1m was paid from Tokyo 2020 to Black Tidings. Officially the payments were for studies, one pre-vote on how Tokyo could win and one after the contest to assess who had voted for them. The studies were laughably superficial for $2m worth of work.
In March this year, Tsunekazu Takeda, president of the Japanese Olympic Committee (JOC) and head of the Tokyo bidding committee at the time, resigned saying he wanted a new generation to take over.
Takeda was questioned by the French inquiry last December when visiting Paris and they placed him under formal investigation. He has denied all allegations of bribery.
Papa and Lamine Diack have also denied allegations that it was a payment to influence votes. But the Diacks are also at the centre of another trail of mystery payments which allegedly connect them to Qatar. In 2011, six months after the Sarkozy-Platini-Thamim lunch, Paris Saint-Germain were bought by Qatar Sports Investments. French police want to know why Oryx QSI, a company related to the Qatar firm, ended up paying two payments worth $3.5m in 2011 to another Papa Diack company, Pamodzi.
Coincidentally this payment came just before the IAAF, headed then by Lamine Diack, would decide between Doha and London for the right to host the 2017 World Athletics Championships. As it turned out, Doha lost that race. But in 2014 Doha did win the right to host the 2019 championships. Nasser Al-Khelaifi, the president of PSG, has overseen the football club’s transformation since 2011, bringing in David Beckham, Neymar and Kylian Mbappe, the last two costing more than £350m.
A member of Uefa’s executive committee, Al-Khelaifi is chairman of beIN Sports, a QSI subsidiary company and suspected of corruption by French police. Technically his legal status is ‘mise en examen’, which means he is now a suspect in the case rather than a witness. He denies the allegation and his lawyer has pointed out that he was not even an official with Oryx when the payment was made.
Yousef Al Obaidly, another PSG board member and beIN Sport chief executive, is also ‘mise en examen’ and the man French police have focused on regarding the $3.5m payments. He denies any suggestion of corruption. His lawyer Jean-Didier Belot told The Associated Press last month: ‘It’s not unusual to make an up-front payment as part of a bid … it was not corruption, but a risk we evaluated.’
Pamodzi, the Diacks’ company, has already featured in another corruption trial. Carlos Nuzman, former president of the Brazil Olympic Committee and Rio 2016 Olympic organising committee, is accused of facilitating a $2m payment from a Brazilian businessman to Pamodzi shortly before the IOC voted on who would host the 2016 Games. Nuzman denies the charges and his trial in Brazil is ongoing. Much of the evidence was provided by the French. Inquiries are also ongoing in the New York’s FBI office into separate suspicious conduct.
The tentacles of this investigation spread far and wide and it could overshadow even the IOC scandals surrounding the award of the 2002 Winter Olympics to Salt Lake City and the meltdown of Fifa in 2015. Whether Lourgouilloux can pursue his investigation to its logical conclusions remains a moot point. At least for now several grandees of sport administration ought to maintain a degree of apprehension in preparation for the early morning call from the French police.