An American former Fifa executive cooperating with the FBI on a major corruption inquiry has admitted that he and other members of the all-powerful executive committee were bribed in return for voting for South Africa’s bid for the 2010 World Cup.
Chuck Blazer, a 70-year-old soccer chief, also admitted in the court facilitating the payment of a bribe relating to the 1998 World Cup in France.
Blazer, an eccentric power broker for American soccer for decades, and a member of the Fifa executive committee for six years until 2013, made the admissions in testimony to a New York judge in 2013 which was made public on Wednesday.
“I and others on the Fifa executive committee agreed to accept bribes in conjunction with the selection of South Africa as the host nation for the 2010 World Cup,” Blazer told the judge in a secret court session in November 2013.
Blazer, whose decision to assist the FBI appears to have been a critical breakthrough for the investigation now engulfing world football’s governing body, has been assisting federal agents since.
Formally entering a guilty plea during the hearing at New York’s eastern district court, Blazer told the judge his involvement in the acceptance bribes in connection with the South Africa bid began “in or around 2004 and continuing through 2011”. In a nod to a wider top-level conspiracy at Fifa, Blazer added: “My actions described above had common participants and results.”
South Africa won the right to stage the 2010 World Cup in 2004, after missing out on the 2006 tournament to Germany in controversial circumstances. But according to last week’s indictment from the US Department of Justice, payments continued after the bid was won.
Last week’s indictment alleges a bribe for Morocco’s failed bid was paid to Jack Warner, the president of the Concacaf, when Blazer was effectively working as his deputy.
The fallout from the US investigation into Fifa has led to an unprecedented crisis for the governance of world football, forcing the dramatic resignation on Tuesday of Fifa’s long-time president, Sepp Blatter.
Earlier on Wednesday, Reuters reported that the FBI, which along with Swiss authorities arrested numerous Fifa officials in Zurich last week on corruption charges, is investigating the awarding of the 2018 and 2022 World Cups to Russia and Qatar.
Blazer’s guilty plea to a slew of charges including racketeering, wire fraud conspiracy, money laundering, income tax and banking offences was revealed last week, on the same day as 17 other Fifa officials and marketing executives were charged with similar crimes.
However the specifics of his court testimony, which took place behind locked doors because of the potential damage to the FBI’s investigation in the event of a leak, remained sealed. The transcript was released on Wednesday following a petition from three New York-based reporters.
It revealed how the judge in the case, Raymond Dearie, referred to Fifa as a “racketeering influenced corrupt organization”, the same terminology used in cases of organised crime, and only allowed the hearing to proceed after the Brooklyn courtroom had been locked.
Entering his plea, Blazer then detailed the long list of events and marketing contracts on which he and others took kickbacks.
“Beginning in or about 1993 and continuing through the early 2000s, I and others agreed to accept bribes and kickbacks in conjunction with the broadcast and other rights to the 1996, 1998, 2000, 2002 and 2003 Gold Cups,” he told the judge.
Blazer is now known to have abused his position to fund an extraordinarily lavish lifestyle, with two apartments in New York’s Trump Tower – one reputedly for his cats. Nicknamed “Mr Ten Percent” after the personal commission he demanded for his facilitation of corporate deals, much of his wealth was concealed in offshore accounts.
Between 2005 and 2010, he did not even file income tax returns with the US Internal Revenue Service.
He documented his travels around the world on Fifa and Concacaf business on his personal blog, in which he waxed lyrical about dinners in the finest restaurants and posted pictures of his meetings with heads of state and celebrities. The blog includes picture of him on a private jet with the late South African leader Nelson Mandela, and a detailed account of a 2010 encounter with Vladimir Putin who, he said, told him he looked like Karl Marx.
Blazer is now receiving treatment in a New York hospital, where he is recovering from extensive treatment for colon cancer. He was apprehended by federal agents working for the FBI and IRS in November 2011 as he drove a mobility scooter to an upmarket Manhattan restaurant.
“We can take you away in handcuffs now – or you can cooperate,” one of the agents told Blazer, according to a report in the New York Daily News.
Faced with demands for millions in unpaid taxes on commissions he had taken from broadcasting contracts, Blazer agreed to plead guilty and blow the whistle on other top Fifa executives.
He appears to have worked for a sustained period of time as an FBI informant, collecting evidence now at the heart of the emerging prosecution. During the 2012 London Olympics, for example, Blazer is even said to have secretly recorded meetings with several Fifa colleagues using a keyfob with a hidden microphone.
Blazer, who pleaded guilty in 2013, was general secretary of Concacaf for 21 years during the period when the Trinidadian Jack Warner was president.
The controversial Warner was also named in last week’s explosive indictment from the US Department of Justice that alleged a “World Cup of fraud”.
That document showed that Warner was the recipient of the bribe referred to by Blazer in his testimony, relating to Morrocco’s failed bid for the 1998 World Cup.
Jeffrey Webb, Warner’s successor and a Fifa vice president who had pledged to clean up Concacaf, was also among those charged and one of seven senior executives arrested in dawn raids in Switzerland last week ahead of Fifa’s Congress.
The alleged bribe relating to the award of the 2010 World Cup was seen as one of the factors that led Blatter to this week stand down after 17 years running world football’s governing body, just days after he was re-elected for a fifth term.
The alleged payment to Warner from South Africa’s World Cup organising committee was deducted at source by Fifa and paid to a Bank of America account linked to Warner, according to US prosecutors.
South African football officials insisted on Wednesday that there was nothing improper in their conduct and Jerome Valcke, the Fifa secretary general who is Blatter’s right hand man and was proved to have knowledge of the payment, also insisted he had nothing to hide.
The Department of Justice said last week that Blazer faces a maximum 20 years’ incarceration in a US prison for the conspiracies, 10 for the failure to declare his foreign bank accounts, and five years for the tax evasion charges.
It said Blazer had pleaded guilty to receiving $750,000 from Jack Warner, part of Blazer’s agreed $1m share of the $10m paid to Concacaf by Fifa, after Warner agreed to vote for South Africa to host the 2010 World Cup.
Blazer forfeited $1.9m when he pleaded guilty, and is due to pay more to the authorities when he is sentenced.
