Trump’s “Greatest” FIFA Tax Payer Bilking
Trump’s odd support of FIFA makes sense when Trump’s business relationships are examined: Bitcoin personal enrichment as the “Bitcoin president,” pardoning and appointment of a unanimously convicted drug cartel leader to Cabinet-level “Pardon Czar”, and pardoning dozens of embezzlers, tax fraud cheats – and now pardoning former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernandez convicted in 2024 of smuggling over 400 tons of drugs and conspiracy to smuggle drugs with Cartel leader “El Chapo.”
Trump’s promotion of the Federation International des Associations de Football (FIFA) and his history of creating memorials and trophies to himself (see: #Unfit: The Psychology of Donald Trump; 2020*) and myriad associations with corrupt friends, officials and pardoning of convicted fraudsters is explained with the following article regarding the long history of corruption within the organization.
“Reports by investigative journalists have linked FIFA leadership with corruption, bribery, and vote rigging related to the election of FIFA president Sepp Blatter and the organization’s decision to award the 2018 and 2022 World Cups to Russia and Qatar, respectively. These allegations led to the indictments of nine high-ranking FIFA officials and five corporate executives by the US Department of Justice on charges including racketeering, wire fraud, and money laundering.
The FIFA president’s total package is worth over $4.67 million dollars with a base salary over $2.78 million dollars and an annual bonus around $1.87 million USD – a 33% increase.
These are crimes Trump routinely pardons.
On 27 May 2015, several of these officials were arrested by Swiss authorities, who launched a simultaneous but separate criminal investigation into how the organization awarded the 2018 and 2022 World Cups.
Many officials were suspended by FIFA’s ethics committee including Sepp Blatter and Michel Platini. In early 2017, reports became public about FIFA president Gianni Infantino attempting to prevent the re-elections of both chairmen of the ethics committee, Cornel Borbely and Hans-Joachim Eckert, during the FIFA congress in May 2017.
On 9 May 2017, following Infantino’s proposal, the FIFA Council decided not to renew the mandates of Borbély and Eckert. Together with the chairmen, 11 of 13 committee members were removed. FIFA has been suspected of corruption regarding the Qatar 2022 FIFA World Cup bid.
In May 2006, British investigative reporter Andrew Jennings book Foul! The Secret World of FIFA: Bribes, Vote-Rigging, and Ticket Scandals (Harper Collins) caused controversy within the football world by detailing an alleged international cash-for-contracts scandal following the collapse of FIFA’s marketing partner International Sport and Leisure (ISL) and revealed how some football officials had been urged to secretly repay the sweeteners they received. The book also alleged that vote-rigging had occurred in the fight for Sepp Blatter’s continued control of FIFA as the organization’s president. Shortly after the release of Foul! a BBC Panorama exposé by Jennings and BBC producer Roger Corke, screened on 11 June 2006, reported that Blatter was being investigated by Swiss police over his role in a secret deal to repay more than £1m worth of bribes pocketed by football officials.
Lord Triesman, the former chairman of the English Football Association, described FIFA as an organization that “behaves like a mafia family”, highlighting the organization’s “decades-long traditions of bribes, bungs, and corruption“.
All testimonies offered in the Panorama exposé were provided through a disguised voice, appearance, or both, save one: Mel Brennan, a former CONCACAF official, became the first high-level football insider to go public with substantial allegations of corruption, nonfeasance, and malfeasance by CONCACAF and FIFA leadership. Brennan—the highest-level African-American in the history of world football governance—joined Jennings, Trinidadian journalist Lisana Liburd, and many others in exposing allegedly inappropriate allocations of money by CONCACAF and drew connections between ostensible CONCACAF criminality and similar behaviours at FIFA. Since then, and in the light of fresh allegations of corruption by FIFA in late 2010, both Jennings and Brennan remain highly critical of FIFA. Brennan has called directly for an alternative to FIFA to be considered by the stakeholders of the sport worldwide.
In a further Panorama exposé broadcast on 29 November 2010, Jennings alleged that three senior FIFA officials, Nicolas Leoz, Issa Hayatou and Ricardo Teixeira, had been paid huge bribes by ISL between 1989 and 1999, which FIFA had failed to investigate. Jennings claimed they appeared on a list of 175 bribes paid by ISL, totalling about $100 million. A former ISL executive said there were suspicions within the company that they were only awarded the marketing contract for successive World Cups by paying bribes to FIFA officials. The program also alleged that another current official, Jack Warner, has been repeatedly involved in reselling World Cup tickets to touts; Blatter said that FIFA had not investigated the allegation because it had not been told about it via ‘official channels.’
Panorama also alleged that FIFA requires nations bidding to host the World Cup to agree to implement special laws, including a blanket tax exemption for FIFA and its corporate sponsors and limitation of workers’ rights. Contrary to FIFA’s demands, these conditions were revealed by the Dutch government, resulting in them being told by FIFA that their bid could be adversely affected. Following Jennings’ earlier investigations, he was banned from all FIFA press conferences for reasons he claimed had not been made clear.
Prime Minister David Cameron and Andy Anson, head of England’s World Cup bid, criticized the timing of the broadcast three days before FIFA decided on the host for the 2018 FIFA World Cup, because it might damage England’s bid; the voters included officials accused by the program.
In June 2011, it came to light that the International Olympic Committee had started inquiry proceedings against FIFA honorary president Jao Havelange into claims of bribery. Panorama alleged that Havelange accepted a $1 million ‘bung’ in 1997 from ISL.
In a 2014 interview, American sportswriter Dave Zirin said that corruption is endemic to FIFA leadership and that the organization should be abolished for the game’s good. He said that currently, FIFA is in charge of both monitoring corruption in association football matches and marketing and selling the sport, but that two “separate” organizational bodies are needed: an organizational body that monitors corruption and match-fixing and the like and an organization that’s responsible for marketing and sponsorships and selling the sport. Zirin said the idea of having a single organization responsible for both seems highly ineffective and detrimental to the sport.
In May 2015, 14 people were arrested, including nine FIFA officials, after being accused of corruption.
In the 2022 World Cup bid, Qatar was honoured to host the World Cup. Since then it has been discovered that Qatar paid as much as $200 billion to host the World Cup. This information was discovered by the Tass news agency in Russia.
Between 2013 and 2015 four individuals, and two sports television rights corporations pleaded guilty to United States financial misconduct charges. The pleas of Chuck Blazer, Jose Hawilla, Daryn Warner, Darrell Warner, Traffic Group and Traffic Sports USA were unsealed in May 2015. In another 2015 case, Singapore also imposed a 6-year “harshest sentence ever received for match-fixing” on match-fixer Eric Ding who had bribed three Lebanese FIFA football officials with prostitutes as an inducement to fix future matches that they would officiate, as well as perverting the course of justice.
Fourteen FIFA officials and marketing executives were indicted by the US Department of Justice in May 2015. The officials were arrested in Switzerland and are in the process of extradition to the US. Specific charges (brought under the RICO Act) include wire tapping, racketeering, and money laundering.
“Swiss authorities say they have also opened a separate criminal investigation into FIFA’s operations pertaining to the 2018 and 2022 World Cup bids“.
FIFA’s top officials were arrested at a hotel in Switzerland on suspicion of receiving bribes totalling $100m (£65m). The US Department of Justice stated that nine FIFA officials and four executives of sports management companies were arrested and accused of over $150m in bribes. The UK Shadow Home Secretary and Labour Member of Parliament, Andy Burnham, stated in May 2015 that England should boycott the 2018 World Cup against corruption in FIFA and military aggression by Russia.
FIFA’s choice to award the 2018 World Cup to Russia and the 2022 World Cup to Qatar has been widely criticized by media. It has been alleged that some FIFA inside sources insist that the Russian kickbacks of cash and gifts given to FIFA executive members were enough to secure the Russian 2018 bid weeks before the result was announced. Sepp Blatter was widely criticized in the media for giving a warning about the “evils of the media” in a speech to FIFA executive committee members shortly before they voted on the hosting of the 2018 World Cup, a reference to The Sunday Times expose’s, and the Panaroma investigation.
Two members of FIFA’s executive committee were banned from all football-related activity in November 2010 for allegedly offering to sell their votes to undercover newspaper reporters. In early May 2011, a British parliamentary inquiry into why England failed to secure the 2018 finals was told by a member of parliament, Damian Collins, that there was evidence from The Sunday Times newspaper that Issa Hayatou of Cameroon and Jacques Anouma of Ivory Coast were paid by Qatar. Qatar has categorically denied the allegations, as have Hayatou and Anouma.
FIFA president Blatter said, as of 23 May 2011, that the British newspaper The Sunday Times has agreed to bring its whistle-blowing source to meet senior FIFA officials, who will decide whether to order a new investigation into alleged World Cup bidding corruption. “[The Sunday Times] are happy, they agreed that they will bring this whistleblower here to Zürich and then we will have a discussion, an investigation of this”, Blatter said.
Specifically, the whistle-blower claims that FIFA executive committee members Issa Hayatou and Jacques Anouma were paid $1.5 million to vote for Qatar. The emirate’s bid beat the United States in a final round of voting last December. Blatter did not rule out reopening the 2022 vote if corruption could be proved, but urged taking the matter “step by step”. The FIFA president said his organization is “anxiously awaiting” more evidence before asking its ethics committee to examine allegations made in Britain’s Parliament in early May 2011.
Hayatou, who is from Cameroon, leads the Confederation of African Football and is a FIFA vice-president. Anouma is president of Ivorian Football Federation. The whistle-blower said Qatar agreed to pay a third African voter, Amos Adamu, for his support. The Nigerian was later suspended from voting after a FIFA ethics court ruled he solicited bribes from undercover Sunday Times reporters posing as lobbyists. Blatter said the newspaper and its whistle-blower would meet with FIFA secretary general, Jerome Valcke, and legal director, Marco Villiger.
On 28 September 2015, Sepp Blatter suggested that the 2018 World Cup being awarded to Russia was planned before the voting, and that the 2022 World Cup would have then been awarded to the United States. However, this plan changed after the election ballot, and the 2022 World Cup was awarded to Qatar instead of the US.
In August 2012, Garcia declared his intention to investigate the bidding process and decision to respectively award the right to host the 2018 and 2022 FIFA World Cup to Russia and Qatar by the FIFA Executive Committee. Garcia delivered his subsequent 350-page report in September 2014, and Eckert then announced that it would not be made public for legal reasons.
FIFA welcomed “the fact that a degree of closure has been reached”, while the Associated Press wrote that the Eckert summary “was denounced by critics as a whitewash.” Hours after the Eckert summary was released, Garcia himself criticized it for being “materially incomplete” with “erroneous representations of the facts and conclusions”, while declaring his intention to appeal to FIFA’s Appeal Committee. On 16 December 2014, FIFA’s Appeal Committee dismissed Garcia’s appeal against the Eckert summary as “not admissible”. FIFA also stated that Eckert’s summary was “neither legally binding nor appealable”. A day later, Garcia resigned from his role as FIFA ethics investigator in protest of FIFA’s conduct, citing a “lack of leadership” and lost confidence in the independence of Eckert from FIFA. In June 2015, Swiss authorities claimed the report was of “little value”.
Further evidence emerged of alleged corruption. On 30 May 2011, Fred Lunn, vice-president of the Bahamas Football Association, said that he was given $40,000 in cash as an incitement to vote for FIFA presidential candidate, Mohamed bin Hammam. In addition, on 11 June 2011 Louis Giskus, president of the Surinamese Football Association, alleged that he was given $40,000 in cash for “development projects” as an incentive to vote for Bin Hammam.
Several of FIFA’s partners and sponsors have raised concerns about the allegations of corruption, including Coca-Cola, Adidas, Emirates and Visa raised concerns by saying “the current allegations being raised are distressing and bad for the sport”; with Adidas saying “the negative tenor of the public debate around FIFA at the moment is neither good for football nor for FIFA and its partners”; moreover Emirates raised its concerns by saying “we hope that these issues will be resolved as soon as possible”; and Visa adding “the current situation is clearly not good for the game and we ask that FIFA take all necessary steps to resolve the concerns that have been raised.”
Australian Sports Minister Mark Arbib said it was clear FIFA needed to change, saying “there is no doubt there needs to be reform of FIFA. This is something that we’re hearing worldwide”, with Australian Senator Nick Xenophon accusing FIFA of “scamming” the country out of the A$46 million (US$35 million) it spent on the Australian 2022 FIFA World Cup bid saying that “until the investigation into FIFA has been completed, Australia must hold off spending any more taxpayers’ money on any future World Cup bids.”
How much tax payer money will Trump spend on holding the World Cup in the US?
Transparency International, which had called on FIFA to postpone the election pending a full independent investigation, renewed its call on FIFA to change its governance structure.
See: Transparency.org on articles regarding Trump’s loosening rules on bribing government officials overseas!
In 2018, FIFA revised its code of ethics to remove corruption as one of the enumerated bases of ethical violations. It retained bribery, misappropriation of funds and manipulation of competitions as offences, but added a statute of limitations clause that those offences could not be pursued after a ten-year period.
The revision also made it an offence to make public statements of a defamatory nature against FIFA. Alexandra Wrage, a former member of the FIFA governance committee and an expert in anti-bribery compliance, said that of the revision that “the real value to FIFA is the chilling effect this will have on critics”. – wikipedia [edited for brevity]
It continues to appear that President Trump has eagerly adopted President Biden’s title as “The Big Guy” when it comes to participating in, condoning and pardoning profitable criminal behavior.
- FIFA’s Dirty Secrets” is an episode of the BBC documentary series Panorama which was broadcast on 29 November 2010.
- In the documentary “Unfit“, a professional golf instructor reported Trump built a “great” golf course, played the very first game on the new course then demanded the golf Club board of directors mount Trump’s name on the wall of “record holders.”
