It is getting to the stage that what the UK media doesn’t tell us is a lot more interesting than what it does

By Tony Attwood

In my piece earlier today I pointed out that the Conservative Party’s proposal to introduce huge restrictions on what people can post, share and publish online in the UK, and so allow Britain to become “the global leader in the regulation of the use of personal data and the internet”, is not being reported in the British mainstream media, because it so obviously benefits them while scaring the hell out of those of us who write blogs.

The newspapers are of course major donors to and supporters of the Conservative Party.  Bloggers tend to take a different point of view.

Equally interesting is the fact that the mainstream media has constantly refrained from keeping its readers up to day with the topic of corruption in football, largely because the media pays to keep football going.  They have the biggest vested interest of all.

Indeed the fact that so much of the background concerning corruption in football is hidden away and regularly avoided by the UK press is yet another reason why we need an open internet, not one controlled by the state as us being proposed for Britain.

As you may have heard if you have been paying close attention Sandro Rosell, president of FC Barcelona from 2010 to 2014, has been threatened with a prison sentence in relation to money laundering and belonging to a criminal organization. Rosell has rejected the allegations.

Rosell has been at the heart of European and indeed world football for years. If he can be persuaded to talk we might well learn a lot more about how the World Cup was given to Qatar, a country that has no human rights record, has no inclination to move towards human rights, and which has ludicrously high daytime temperatures.

As those papers in Europe that are reporting the issues report with glee, journeys to Madrid were one of the recurring themes in Sandro Rosell’s life through 2014 when he was still president of FC Barcelona. Recently he went back there, but the trip was not as pompous as it used to be. Instead of the Learjets, an armored van was waiting from the police station in Barcelona, ​​and from there he was taken to the Tres Cantos headquarters in Madrid, where Rosell had to spend the night. On the next day, Carmela Lamela a judge at the National Court awaited the pleasure of his company.

The subject under discussion was the old curse of football, and one that Untold has interested itself in many times: money laundering and belonging to a criminal organization. Rosell, unsurprisingly continued to reject the accusations.

But it does not look good for the man who ruled Barça for those four years, for he is now in police custody along with his wife, and the hefty sum of 35 million euros have been frozen by police in the couple’s bank accounts.

Rosell is also the focus of interest by the US Justice Department. He is considered a central “domino” in the game now being called by European commentators FifaGate.  (One might hope for a more imaginative name some day, but Fifagate it is.    The title is not being used in the UK where Fifa largely remains off-limits to the press (at least until the arrests start again) and quite simply describes the growing number of corruption cases surrounding the Fifa – the organisation to which the UK government has continued to pay money, via the bankrupt FA.

But the thinking in Europe and indeed in the USA is, if Rosell can be taken down, he will then bring down the rest of the edifice.

Rosell was closely linked to key figures in Fifa, including Fifa General Secretary Jérôme Valcke, who was fired in 2016, and with  former President of the Brazilian FA Ricardo Teixeira. Between them it is alleged, they controlled the TV income of the Brazil national team, holding back substantial sums that should have gone to the Brazil National Association.  Instead the money went into an account of a private company in New Jersey that belonged to Rosell.

Various star players including Neymar were then approached to play an unspecified friendly, but with the funds for the game paid not to the Brazil association, but to a company in the Caribbean.

According to documents now before the court, 1.6 million dollars were paid to a company called ISE, which included investors from Qatar and Saudi Arabia. ISE passed only 68% of the money through the proper channels, the rest going into Rosell’s company.

In fact the allegations added together now suggest that in 2011, a company of Rosell sent a total of 1.7 million euros to the account of the eleven-year-old daughter of Teixeiras. Many millions are said to have then been laundered via Andorra.

The Rosell case is doubly explosive…

On the one hand, he connects the main suspects in FifaGate: In addition to Teixeira, Rosell is also closely with Jérôme Valcke the former Fifa General Secretary, who is in the focus of Swiss Federal Ministers investigation, who had set up another sports agency in Barcelona

On the other hand the Rosell case also leads to a shadowy area that has barely been considered in the football investigations: the sponsors.   Nike is the first sponsor to be picked up by the US judiciary, the group is mentioned in a Fifagate lawsuit under the term sportswear company A.

Nike has said it is cooperating with the authorities.

Elsewhere

• Why Untold might be reaching the end of its time, and how we can influence the future.
• Arsenal fans appear to be ready to cull a huge part of the current squad.
• Comparison of top club’s figures
• Arsenal signing complete as players queue to join Arsenal now the contract is announced.