100 years since Chapman came to Arsenal: Latest article:
This is a story that doesn’t appear in the English media, but which seems to me to be of some interest. For it concerns Nasser Al-Khelaïfi, who is not just some foreign chap who gets a bit confused as to what is and what is not allowed when it comes to football. He is the chairman of beIN Media Group, and chairman of Qatar Sports Investments, and just for good measure president of Paris Saint-Germain.
Which makes him a pretty big dude when it comes to footballing whatnots.
And just in case the name PSG doesn’t’t mean too much to you, they were the French league champions in 2012–13, 2013–14, 2014–15, 2015–16, 2017–18, 2018–19, 2019–20, 2021–22, 2022–23, and 2023–24. Arsenal beat them 2-0 in matchday two of this season.
His indictment on February 5 in France is reported as being for complicity in abuse of power.
The “abuse of power” in question came in the investigation into an alleged attempt in 2018 by Arnaud Lagardère to change the way he voted in a key issue involving the Qatari fund.
Sources in France are confirming that the indictment is for “complicity in vote buying and violation of freedom to vote, as well as for complicity in abuse of power.”
The Sovereign Wealth Fund that the accused man is a part of, put up a spokesman in response to this news saying, “This case has absolutely and clearly nothing to do with Nasser Al-Khelaïfi, but as usual, he will be associated with it through a completely distorted process.” Of course we don’t know what will happen, but the case certainly has some details of interest and one of those suggests that he could be indicted. Sadly the UK press doesn’t think much of it, and isn’t covering the story very much.
As far as we can tell the details here are that Mr Lagardère is accused of having fraudulently used funds from the companies Lagardère SAS and Lagardère Capital & Management (LCM) for a number of years. It is said the amount involved is around 125 million euros, and the money was used to cover his personal expenses.
And I suppose we can all sympathise with that, what with the price of cauliflower going up all the time.
But there is more and this relates to 2018, when there was an ongoing power struggle between Vincent Bolloré who was chummy with those working in Amber Capital, and Bernard Arnault, who is said to have supported Arnaud Lagardère.
What seems to have happened is that as matters proceeded in the run-up to deciding who was going to run what and with whom, the sovereign wealth fund suddenly changed its mind in terms of whether it was voting for or against a set of resolutions concerning the governance of the wealth fund. There are also suggestions that a supposedly independent member of the board of Lagardère SCA was not independent at all.
So there was a big takeover battle to get control of the Lagardère group which was eventually bought in 2023 by a media group Vivendi, and all sorts of people are a bit miffed about the whole affair.
Mr. Al-Khelaïfi is indicted, according to reports, “for corruption in the case of Qatar’s bids for the 2017 and 2019 World Athletics Championships”. But this was annulled by the Court of Cassation, a court which does not re-examine the facts of a case but instead only interprets the relevant law. This court ruled that the French courts were incompetent to bring proceedings against him.
Meanwhile just to add to the sense of everything falling apart in all directions at once, it is being reported that judges in Paris are demanding an investigation into “accusations of kidnapping and sequestration in Qatar” of which the Franco-Algerian lobbyist Tayeb Benabderrahmane claims to have been the victim.
The owners of PSG have now denied everything and have filed a complaint against the claim.
Meanwhile PSG itself surprised many onlookers by coming only 15th in the Champions League first round of matches this season, winning four and losing three of their eight games. They did however beat Brest comfortably in the first leg of the play-off round of the Champions League, and are as ever way out in front in the increasingly meaningless French league, ten points ahead of Marseille in second place and 16 points above Nice in third place.
The fact that PSG found the Champions League hard going in the first round does indicate that French football has slipped further behind the game as played elsewhere and is possible that the legal whatnots reported above are in part due to this. We of course have no evidence of that; it’s just an idea built out of ignorance. But erruptions like this have a history of not going away.
