By Paul Nicholson
November 2 – Anyone who thought the seismic impact of disgraced American football official Chuck Blazer was over can think again. Blazer has been named as the main informant in an FBI investigation reportedly into money laundering and fraud in football.
The information supplied by Blazer is said, in a wide-ranging article in the New York Daily News, to implicate a number of senior football officials within the federation and FIFA hierarchy.
Blazer co-operated with the FBI to the degree that he undertook secretly recorded meetings with football executives that the FBI had identified were of interest to them; this included pretty much anyone who was a member of the FIFA Executive Committee that voted for Russia 2018 and Qatar 2022, as well as a realm of individuals close to the President of FIFA Sepp Blatter.
Blazer is currently in New York undergoing a personal battle against colon cancer. He was former general secretary of CONCACAF as well as a FIFA executive committee member but has not been involved in football since May 2013 when he was banned by FIFA from taking part in any kind of football-related activity at national and international level.
The FIFA Ethics Committee had earlier opened investigation proceedings against Blazer following referral of the final report of the CONCACAF Integrity Committee into the conduct of the former president of CONCACAF Jack Warner and Blazer. Blazer had received more than $20 million in compensation from CONCACAF, including $17 million in commissions which were paid, mostly, via an offshore marketing company.
In a wide-ranging article in the New York Daily News, Blazer is said to have agreed to co-operate with the FBI and IRS after being threatened with unpaid tax crimes on as much as $29 million of income, most of it received via his work within CONCACAF.
Blazer has long been suspected of having cut a deal with the American law and tax authorities and was the whistleblower who brought down former CONCACAF president and FIFA exco member Jack Warner following the cash for votes scandal in 2011 – a scandal that also brought down Asian Football Confederation president Mohammed Bin Hamman and ended his bid for the FIFA presidency.
Blazer’s co-operation with the FBI apparently began at least three years ago. At the Olympic Games in London in 2012 Blazer organised and requested a series of meetings with FIFA colleagues and football leaders at the May Fair hotel in London’s west end. He had been given a keychain with a tiny microphone embedded in its specially altered fob for these meetings.
That Blazer had earned large amounts of money from his time at CONCACAF – he was known as ‘Mr 10%’, referring to his cut of every deal that went into the confederation – is not new. Nor is the report of the IRS investigation into Blazer and his remarkably high-expensed lifestyle.
What is new is the information that Blazer was already working with the FBI, supplying and gathering information prior to his expulsion from footbal
The motivation for the FBI investigation into football and executives beyond its US borders raises various questions into US objectives.
The US authorities have been pursuing Trinidadian Warner for some time and the current information released to the New York Daily News looks like it could be the start of a series of stories of misdemeanours in high football office.
Warner has resisted approaches from the American law enforcement authorities and his son has been questioned in Miami over bank accounts in his father’s name. If the Americans can get to Warner – which means face –to-face access that up to this point has been denied – then Warner could be persuaded to talk more widely about his FIFA dealings in return for immunity from prosecution. If that is the US objective.
It is not known how close former FBI investigator Michael Garcia, who is now FIFA’s chief ethics investigator and responsible for the report into the 2018 and 2022 bidding process, is to the FBI investigation that has been lead by criminal investigators from the Eastern District of New York. However, it seems unlikely, considering Garcia’s links to the FBI, that the investigators are unknown to him.
Garcia had exempted himself from interviewing Blazer in his own FIFA ethics investigation into World Cup bidding on the basis that he was of the same nationality.
The release of the story in the New York Daily News looks like it could be the start of a new ball snowball – with many of the same accusations as before -rolling towards FIFA. But this time there may be a more substantiated centre that could damage senior individuals within the organisation if it hits its target.
Contact the writer of this story at moc.l1734831337labto1734831337ofdlr1734831337owedi1734831337sni@n1734831337osloh1734831337cin.l1734831337uap1734831337