FBI, Football and Fiction:

FBI, FOOTBALL, AND FICTION:

FIFA ARRESTS "POLITICAL"
SAY CRITICS:

US "Justice" aimed at Russia?

There has been speculation and allegations for years that there is a lot of corruption inside the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA). Bribes and behind the scenes deals have been going on for decades. The sport federation is responsible for the most watched and popular sport in the world and is part of a lucrative business venture that has a lot of political power and prestige attached to it. It also has deals with the UN for developing sport in Third World countries which generally has a positive affect in those countries.

The scandal and arrests that have taken place recently, however, has little to do with corruption and much more to do with geopolitics. FIFA has become yet another arena for the multi-spectrum war being fought by the US and its cronies against countries like Russia. The energy and currency wars are now being augmented by a “behind the scenes” war at FIFA. Joseph Blatter or Sepp is a casualty of this war.

As far back as 2005, Blatter had refused to get embroiled in Washington’s geopolitical chess games. Under him, FIFA refused to surrender to the US Department of State’s demands that Iran’s team be blocked from participating in World Cup 2006 or demands that Palestine not be admitted into FIFA. Thus Blatter’s stance became anathema to the Washington Neo-cons and “New World Order” fantasists and the powerful Zionist lobby in the US Congress.

FIFA’s consideration of Palestinian requests to suspend Israel, on the basis of Israeli sabotage and attacks against the Palestinian team, as item fifteen of the agenda of its 65th Congress  was another slap in the face for Washington  and its criminal military activities worldwide. Days before the 65th FIFA Congress was to take place, however, Blatter met with both Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in a diplomatic attempt to reach some type of understanding as the pressure from Washington was intensifying. This may be the basis for the withdrawal of the Palestinian Football Association’s motion to suspend the Israeli Football Association from FIFA since Abbas is also vulnerable to pressure from Washington.

Not only were both the US and Britain upset that they were not awarded the status of hosting World Cup 2018 and World Cup 2022, but they have been continuously pressuring FIFA against Russia. What may have led to Washington’s campaign to remove Blatter by organising a coup inside FIFA against the FIFA boss was FIFA’s refusal to sanction Russia by getting on board with the US and EU program of economic and political sanctions against Moscow.

Just days after he was re-elected on May 29, 2015, to continue heading FIFA for a fifth term by the majority of delegates at the 65th FIFA Congress, Joseph Sepp Blatter took the surprising step of announcing that he was stepping down as the international sport federation’s president on June 2, 2015.  The move was unusual, because up until his May re-election Blatter had managed to overcome the pressure and attempts by the US and its stooges to force him to resign from the presidency of FIFA. He announced that he had taken the decision because he did not have everyone’s support for his continued presidency in FIFA during a press conference at FIFA’s headquarters in Zurich, Switzerland.

One hundred and thirty-three out of two hundred and nine association representatives at the 65th FIFA Congress voted for Blatter in the first round of voting at the Hallenstadion in Zurich. This amounts to 63.6%, or roughly 64%, of the FIFA Congress. Since this number was just short of two-thirds or 66% of FIFA’s voting members needed to secure a first round win, a second round of voting was to commence.

FIFA Vice-President for Asia and runner-up, Prince Ali bin Al-Hussein bin Al-Talal bin Abdullah, brother of King Abdullah of Jordan, had no chance of winning and dropped out of the election before a second round of voting took place.  Prince Ali had managed to secure only seventy-three votes in the first round. This means that 34.9% (approximately 35%) of FIFA supported Prince Ali’s bid to run FIFA as its new president.[Jordan is an artificial country set up by British Imperialism in the 1920’s on the territory of the Palestine Mandate granted by the League of Nations to Britain in the aftermath of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire at the end of WW1. Britain took over former territory of the Ottomans in Palestine and Mesopotamia and Basra and created the Kingdom of Iraq and later dividing Palestine east and west of the Jordan river to form another state, “Trans-Jordan” with puppet rulers of both from the Hashemite tribe of southern Arabia who were allied to Britain against the Ottomans in WW1. Jordan has been in the pocket of British and later US imperialism ever since].

Despite the fact that he had secured the support of the majority of soccer/football associations at the FIFA elections, Blatter was still coerced into announcing his resignation. After his re-election by the 65th FIFA Congress, reports published by the New York Times, ABC News, and Reuters all announced that Blatter was now being criminally investigated by US authorities. Blatter had for days tried to distance himself from the controversy, but several United States officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, admitted that they wanted to build a case against him by using FIFA colleagues of his that they had arrested earlier (Sam Borden, Michael S. Schmidt, and Matt Apuzzo, “Sepp Blatter Decides to Resign as FIFA President in About-Face”, New York Times, 2 June 2015).

Prior to the investigation on Blatter, the US had the Swiss police arrest seven FIFA officials at the Hotel Baur au Lac in Zurich on May 27, 2015. These officials were in Zurich preparing to cast their ballots for the FIFA elections. They were arrested on “suspicions” of corruption and extradited to the US by Switzerland.

The US actually accelerated its investigation even while a separate probe was being conducted by the authorities in Switzerland as to how FIFA awarded World Cup 2018 to Russia and World Cup 2022 to Qatar. This is the crux of the matter. FIFA was not willing to rescind its decisions and follow Washington’s geopolitical agenda against Russia. The timing of the raids and arrests occurred twenty-four hours before FIFA’s elections. The arrests were deliberately planned in a blatant attempt to prevent Blatter from being re-elected. Blatter responded by saying, “No one is going to tell me that it was a simple coincidence, this American attack two days before the elections of FIFA. It doesn’t smell good”.

The divisions of geopolitical rivalries and divisions are now manifesting themselves in FIFA. Although the voting at the Hallenstadion was conducted by secret ballot, there is a general understanding of how the FIFA delegates and regional confederacies voted.  Aside from Australia, all forty-seven members of the Asian Football Confederation (AFC) are believed to have voted for Blatter. The AFC made strong statements of support for Blatter since the scandal broke. The fifty-four members of the Confédération Africaine de Football/Confederation of African Football (CAF), which is the largest FIFA confederation, also all voted for Blatter and made strong shows of support for him like the AFC.

The Union des Associations Européennes de Football/Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) and the US on the other hand were hostile towards Blatter. EU politicians, including British Prime Minister David Cameron, had been demanding he resign as the president of FIFA. UEFA even threatened to cut ties with FIFA if Blatter was re-elected.  The English Football Association also called for a boycott of the World Cup. The campaign against Blatter reached a point where he said that UEFA was involved in an unnecessary demonisation campaign.

UEFA, however, was not united against Blatter. UEFA is divided: a quarter of its members apparently voted for Mr Blatter, defying a plea from Michel Platini, UEFA’s head, to oust the Swiss from the Presidency. Among those who backed the incumbent were Russia, Spain and, less predictably, France, Mr Platini’s own country. So UEFA action is unlikely to extend much beyond removing co-operation from FIFA committees behind the scenes, the Russian Federation, at both the FIFA level and the political level of the Kremlin, voiced its strong support for Joseph Sepp Blatter. Vladimir Putin even offered public support to Blatter. Aside from France, Spain, and Russia, as many as eighteen UEFA members, including Armenia, Belarus, Finland, and Kazakhstan are believed to have supported Blatter during the voting in Zurich («‘Little point’ to divided UEFA talks on Joseph Sepp Blatter, says Dutch football association,» Dutch News, 2 June 2015).

The US and Canada were also isolated among the Confederation of North, Central America, and Caribbean Association Football (CONCACAF). The CONCACAF countries of Central America and the Caribbean put their support behind Blatter.

The Whore Press in the US and Britain have tried to portray Blatter’s projects to enhance the standing of soccer/football in Africa and Asia through investment and development projects as a form of “bribery”. Nothing, of course, about the decades of real bribery of African dictators and politicians in order to facilitate the plundering of Africa’s natural resources by British and US Corporate Monopolies. Even critics admit that the equal division of profits between the two hundred and nine members of FIFA generated by revenues and tournaments “has prompted many a genuine football revolution in the developing world” (Tom Peck, “Fifa corruption: How Sepp Blatter buys support by investing FIFA’s millions in Africa,” Independent [London], 28 May 2015).

Mauritania provides an excellent case study of how the equal division of profits among all of FIFA’s members, starting in 2013, has helped poorer countries improve the standing of soccer/football. To enhance the profile of the sport, studios were built to provide Mauritanians the opportunity to watch the sport on television.  Two paragraphs published in the Independent relay what occurred:

“We now have a TV production unit, one of the first of its kind in Africa,» explained the president of the Mauritanian Football Association, Ahmed Ould Yahya, at the time. “We’ve signed a contract with the national broadcasting company and we show matches every week. That is really changing the image of the game in the country”. Before the money arrived, Mauritanian football had effectively collapsed. It had never played in an international tournament, and fallen out of the world rankings. It is still struggling, but now it also has pitches and facilities, all paid for by FIFA. Mauritania has never played in a World Cup, but has had its share of the profits. All 209 FIFA member nations receive an equal share of the income from the tournament in Brazil in 2014, around $1.2m (£783,000).

The above is being billed as a form of bribery. Not once is the deep corruption, match-fixing and secret deals on sale of footballers between clubs involved in UEFA or the European Union ever mentioned. This has prompted observations that aside from geopolitics, that this is an issue of power and economics. The following excerpt illustrates this point: “‘The past two editions of the World Cup have been played in South Africa and Brazil. The next one is in Russia. All three are BRICS countries. It’s obvious that the west is not very happy with this. All this talk about corruption is an attempt by Europe and America to bring the game back into their sphere of influence”, says Thiago Cassis, a reputable Brazilian football writer. “There is a lot of corruption in European football too. They do not talk about it. This whole game is not about tackling corruption, but regaining control…”  (Shobhan Saxena, “Make No Mistake, the FIFA War is Not About Football or Corruption”, Wire, 31 May 2015).

“Dependent on South America and Africa for football talent, and, increasingly Asia for TV audiences, the Europeans know they are losing control of soccer/football”, the Brazilian journalist Shobhan Saxena has noted .  “Europe wants to import all the labour from us because that gives them a global TV audience and lots of money. But, they do not want to give us World Cups or share any power with us”, a FIFA delegate from Africa at the 65th FIFA Congress has explained in this regard.

All the FIFA officials arrested before the elections in Zurich were Latin Americans from Central America and South America. Aside from their own corruption investigations, this has prompted both resentment and backlash in CONCACAF and the Confederación Sudamericana de Fútbol/South American Football Confederation (CONMEBOL). The Wire gives the Latin American perspective on why the US and its allies targeted the Latin Americans in FIFA. “Why did they arrest officials only from our federations and that too in Switzerland? Why didn’t they approach our governments through Interpol? Is it because they knew that extradition from South America to US is impossible?” one of Brazil’s soccer/football official asks. This account points to an organised effort to derail FIFA with a coup: “There was also anger about reports in the western media about the CBF chief Marco Polo Del Nero ‘fleeing’ Zurich for Brazil as he ‘feared’ arrest. In fact, when papers like the Guardian and New York Times were reporting Del Nero’s ‘escape’ from the FIFA meeting, the Brazilian official was still in Switzerland. “They brought all this pressure on us to force us to vote for Prince Ali. They have been lobbying with us for months. When they didn’t see it working, they conducted the raid followed by veiled threats to others that they could be arrested too. Some British and American journalists were part of this pressure tactic,” the Brazilian official alleged.

What it all comes down to is World Cup 2018 in Russia. The Latin American perspective is the following: “From the versions of the Zurich raid given by some South American officials, it appears that the FBI, Swiss police and a few western reporters hunted them together” Saxena reports. He was also told by one FIFA delegate from South America that the US was trying to pressure the Latin Americans. “As the Asian and African vote was solidly behind Blatter, they wanted the votes from the Americas for Prince Ali. They were desperate to make the Prince the new chief of FIFA as he could re-open the bids for the 2018 and 2022 tournaments”, testifies the Paraguayan official. “Since the UK and the US lost the 2018 and 2022 bids respectively, they have been working to somehow cancel the World Cups in Russia and Qatar. They haven’t accepted the fact that they lost the bids in a fair contest”, the same official has explained.

Prince Ali, who is also the head of both the Jordanian Football Association and the West Asian Football Federation, was the candidate that Blatter’s opponents in the US and Britain had put forward to implement their agenda. The US, Britain, and the leadership of UEFA had for months been actively lobbying for Prince Ali against Sepp Blatter. True to his pedigree, like the other so-called “royals” of the Hashemite family in Jordan, Prince Ali is a puppet or a “stooge” that represents US and British interests as one anonymous Brazilian official told Saxena in an interview.

The whole FIFA scandal is not about corruption or dignity. The whole affair is about geopolitics and a sleazy attempt at managing the world in accordance with Washington and Brussels agendas. Joseph Sepp Blatter was forced to step down because FIFA refused to cancel its decision to allow Russia to host World Cup 2018 and to reopen the bids for hosting World Cup 2018 and World Cup 2022. The US enforcers already had Internal revenues cases against certain FIFA ex-officials one of which was Charles Blazer, 70, the  former general secretary of Soccer’s governing body for North America, Central America and the Caribbean (CONCACAF). Blazer,70, and suffering from cancer, was easily pressured and turned FBI stoolpigeon entering a guilty plea (a well-known ploy in US criminal cases for getting a lesser sentence for alleged crimes). Confronted years ago by the IRS for failing to pay taxes, Blazer agreed to wear a hidden microphone in meetings with FIFA officials, the New York Daily News reported in November, 2014. Blazer secretly pleaded guilty in a secret court hearing in November, 2013, to racketeering conspiracy, wire-fraud conspiracy, money-laundering conspiracy, income-tax evasion and failure to file a Report of Foreign Bank and Financial Accounts, charges that were made public only recently. He forfeited more than $1.9 million at the time of his plea and has agreed to pay more money when he’s sentenced. 

The initial prosecutor against Blazer on the tax issue was (Holy Coincidence, Batman!) none other than Ms Loretta Lynch, now US Attorney General who is vigorously prosecuting the international case. Blazer admitted he participated in several bribery schemes involving soccer tournaments, including the World Cups in 1998 and 2010, according to court records. He took a $750,000 cut of a $10 million bribe to support South Africa’s host bid for the 2010 World Cup, according to the criminal charges he admitted. The South African Government has strongly denied these allegations and provided certified accounts covering the $10M. South Africa has accused the US of political bias and manoeuvring against developing countries in pursuit of its own corrupt interests worldwide. South Africa is also a member of the BRICS economic alliance.

Lynch, showing the impartiality for which she is well known, turned up at a meeting of US and EU Justice Ministers  in Latvian capital, Riga, on June 3, 2015, and gave the following comment:

 “We certainly hope the organisation (FIFA) will be able to move forward in a way that are supportive of its goals, which are the promotion and regulation of a truly wonderful sport,” Lynch said.

Lynch then had the following to say about the FBI’s ongoing investigation into corruption at FIFA when asked if Blatter was being investigated.

“With respect to the FIFA investigation as was announced last week we are not able to comment further on the nature of other individuals who may or may not be under investigation,” Lynch said. “This is an ongoing matter, it is an open case, and so we will now be speaking through the courts.”

Lynch then confirmed that the Swiss authorities are looking into the allocation of the 2018 and 2022 World Cups but “could not add anything further”.

“The Swiss authorities do have an investigation underway and their investigation covers matters involving the World Cup awarding for 2018 and 2022, and beyond that I am not able to comment.”

Although, in a separate announcement in New York same day, June 3, an anonymous US justice official said that the FBI was extending its investigation to cover the awarding of the 2018 World Cup to Russia. Latvia is one of the most hostile countries to Russia in the Baltic region and its stooge government is a total lackey of the US/EU/NATO alliance. If there is a smell of bribery anywhere, Riga is one of the places where the stink is overwhelming.