FIFA Corruption

[Zatman]

 

yeah, its not like professional photography and filming is banned without permission in Trafalgar square, parliament square and royal parks... you also need permission to film on all private property, i'm pretty sure you'll also need a consent form from everyone you film, or blur them out

 

Foreign travellers are welcome to whip cameras out in Traf Square, Parliament Square and Hyde Park. Try that on a Qatari stadium site.

 

It's safety, public liability, RF allocation and all that jazz they worry about with pro shoots in Traf Square (they can also ask for money!).

 

I work on London sites from time to time with film crews.

 

 

you would need to be a very different type of tourist to be taking photos of building sites

[CarewsEyebrowDesigner]

ugh, 'the law is the law' is a shitty argument in these cases and y'all should know better. one suspects the law in question was conjured up in the first place to prevent people snooping around.

[villa4europe]

If you're on a site with a film crew then that film crew has asked permission from the main contractor first, and the main contractor by right can deny access if they want, if I phoned up Balfour Beatty and said I want to go on their site tomorrow to film a bit of footage to help with my article on how poor their working conditions are what do you think their answer would be?

Either **** off or send me to a considerate constructors gold site

And I agree, the fact that it's the law doesn't make it right and it's obviously a piss poor excuse but it is the exact same law here!

Edited May 6, 2015 by villa4europe

[Xann]

If you were a naughty Balfour Beatty and you had mended your ways, surely you'd have no objection to filming on site to prove as such.

[StanBalaban]

Just seen Sepp Blatter on one of these sports roundup shows talking about FIFA trying to rid the game of racism and homophobia.

How does this sit with awarding the World Cup to an anti-Semetic country where being gay is illegal?

Edited May 17, 2015 by StanBalaban

[Jimzk5]

Just seen Sepp Blatter on one of these sports roundup shows talking about FIFA trying to rid the game of racism and homophobia.

How does this sit with awarding the World Cup to an anti-Semetic country where being gay is illegal?

Because sepp is on a mission in football and by taking the world cup to the arse end of the desert to a country which holds these abhorrent and disgusting laws football can change them.

Or the other option, as mr blatter says, refrain from being gay in Qatar.

[villa4europe]

Yep sepp gets to change the world through the power of football, he gets to land at a new airport, travel on a new road and visit a new stadium and sit their grinning knowing football built it all

The fact that it's all worth **** all as soon as football leaves after a month is completely lost on him

[Czechlad]

Espn did a documentary on Sep Blatter which covered the world cup decisions and it really was amazing to see. Overwhelming evidence that members of fifa took bribes for both the Russian and Qata world cup bids. A woman who worked for the Qatar world cup bid spilled a lot of secrets. They also showed footage of two british journalists posing as Americans who were working for the USA world cup bid and got a fifa member soliciting a bribe on camera. I'd highly recommend watching it. Very well done. ESPN is not longer scared to expose fifa since losing the viewing rights for the world cup.

[MrDuck]

There's a rumour going around that Sepp won't visit the US as the FBI would grab him on corruption charges or something? 

[Stevo985]

Arrested for reporting on Qatar's World Cup labourers

 

We were invited to Qatar by the prime minister's office to see new flagship accommodation for low-paid migrant workers - but while gathering additional material for our report, we ended up being thrown into prison for doing our jobs.

Our arrest was dramatic.

We were on a quiet stretch of road in the capital, Doha, on our way to film a group of workers from Nepal.

The working and housing conditions of migrant workers constructing new buildings in Qatar ahead of the World Cup have been heavily criticised and we wanted to see them for ourselves.

Suddenly, eight white cars surrounded our vehicle and directed us on to a side road at speed.

A dozen security officers frisked us in the street, shouting at us when we tried to talk. They took away our equipment and hard drives and drove us to their headquarters.

Later, in the city's main police station, the cameraman, translator, driver and I were interrogated separately by intelligence officers. The questioning was hostile.

We were never accused of anything directly, instead they asked over and over what we had done and who we had met.

Qatar has been criticised over abuse of migrant workers

During a pause in proceedings, one officer whispered that I couldn't make a phone call to let people know where we were. He explained that our detention was being dealt with as a matter of national security.

An hour into my grilling, one of the interrogators brought out a paper folder of photographs which proved they had been trailing me in cars and on foot for two days since the moment I'd arrived.

I was shown pictures of myself and the team standing in the street, at a coffee shop, on board a bus and even lying next to a swimming pool with friends. It was a shock. I had never suspected I was being tailed.

At 01:00, we were taken to the local prison.

'Not Disneyland'

It was meant to be the first day of our PR tour but instead we were later handcuffed and taken to be questioned for a second time, at the department of public prosecutions.

Thirteen hours of waiting around and questioning later, one of the interrogators snapped. "This is not Disneyland," he barked. "You can't stick your camera anywhere."

It was as if he felt we were treating his country like something to be gawped at, suggesting we thought of trips to see controversial housing and working conditions as a form of entertainment.

In perfect English and with more than a touch of malice, he threatened us with another four days in prison - to teach us a lesson.

I began my second night in prison on a disgusting soiled mattress. At least we did not go hungry, as we had the previous day. One of the guards took pity on us and sent out for roast chicken with rice.

In the early hours of the next morning, just as suddenly as we were arrested, we were released.

Qatar has seen an influx of migrants to build facilities for the 2022 tournament

Bizarrely, we were allowed to join the organised press trip for which we had come.

It was as if nothing had happened, despite the fact that our kit was still impounded, and we were banned from leaving the country.

I can only report on what has happened now that our travel ban has been lifted.

No charges were brought, but our belongings have still not been returned.

So why does Qatar welcome members of the international media while at the same time imprisoning them?

Is it a case of the left arm not knowing what the right arm is doing, or is it an internal struggle for control between modernisers and conservatives?

PR effort

Whatever the explanation, Qatar's Jekyll-and-Hyde approach to journalism has been exposed by the spotlight that has been thrown on it after winning the World Cup bid.

Other journalists and activists, including a German TV crew, have also recently been detained.

How the country handles the media, as it prepares to host one of the world's most watched sporting events, is now also becoming a concern.

Mustafa Qadri, Amnesty International's Gulf migrant rights researcher, told us the detentions of journalists and activists could be attempts "to intimidate those who seek to expose labour abuse in Qatar".

Qatar, the world's richest country for its population size of little more than two million people, is pouring money into trying to improve its reputation for allowing poor living standards for low-skilled workers to persist.

Government inspectors have said some accommodation is substandard

Inside Qatar's squalid labour camps

A highly respected London-based PR firm, Portland Communications, now courts international journalists. On the day we left prison, it showed us spacious and comfortable villas for construction workers, with swimming pools, gyms and welfare officers.

This was part of the showcase tour of workers' accommodation, and it was organised by the prime minister's office.

Qatar's World Cup organising committee, which answers to Fifa, was helping to run the tour.

Fifa says it is now investigating what happened to us. It has issued the following statement: "Any instance relating to an apparent restriction of press freedom is of concern to Fifa and will be looked into with the seriousness it deserves."

'Open country'

Following our detention, the minister of labour agreed to talk to us on camera about how the media can cover what human rights campaigners have identified as "forced labour" within his country.

"Qatar is an open country forever, since ever," Abdullah al-Khulaifi said.

"The shortcomings that I am facing, the problems I am facing, I cannot hide. Qatar is open and now with the smartphones, everyone is a journalist," he said.

He said the negative coverage of migrant workers' conditions was wildly overblown and that much progress had been made to improve basic conditions for migrant workers.

The government has implemented a wage protection scheme. It says at least 450 companies have been banned from working in the country and more than $6m (£3.8m) of fines have been handed out to firms mistreating workers, and the number of inspectors has been doubled.

Workers are now ferried to and from work in buses, not lorries.

Labourers arriving at their housing after a shift

But change has not come easily in what one security guard privately described to me as a country with surveillance officers everywhere.

Without trade unions or a free media, bosses of large domestic and international companies have little incentive to radically improve conditions for well over a million labourers desperate for money.

Before we were detained, I met an 18-year-old mechanic, one of the 400,000 Nepalese workers there.

He said he wanted to support his older brothers because his father had died and the family was struggling financially.

He paid a recruitment agency in Nepal $600 to arrange his visa to work in Qatar and was told he would earn $300 a month.

When he arrived he was told his salary, as a labour camp cleaner for air conditioning mechanics, was in fact $165 a month. He said he has never been given a copy of the contract he signed. Worse still, he said he could not understand it as it was in English.

It's a very common trick that foreign recruitment agents play before workers even get to Qatar, and very difficult for Qatar itself to police, although it says it is trying.

This young man now finds himself at the mercy of Qatar's restrictive kafala system, which prevents workers from changing jobs for five years. Being tied to an employer in that way can leave migrant workers open to exploitation.

However, with so much money needed for rebuilding decimated parts of Nepal, there will be no shortage of future volunteers.

And as Qatar's World Cup approaches, the focus on migrant labour is only likely to increase.

[Xann]

Edit - Stevo in there.

Edited May 18, 2015 by Xann

[HanoiVillan]

Marina Hyde in the Guardian:

 

Clearly there must be a magic number of slave deaths in the world’s richest country that would render the Qatar World Cup a moral and political no-no. But what is that number? What is the ballpark figure where deaths in the construction of ballparks become unacceptable?

 

The question is not believed to be keeping Sepp Blatter awake at night. Something tells me the Fifa president sleeps the bewilderingly untroubled sleep that only a certain stripe of Western leader enjoys. (Do recall that Tony Blair actually had to be woken up to be told the bombing of Baghdad he’d co-ordered was soon to begin.)

 

Fifa’s sponsors, though, are deemed more reachable. This week has seen the launch of a campaign by the International Trade Union Confederation, Play Fair Qatar and the NewFifaNow group to shame them with the appalling conditions endured by labourers building tournament infrastructure for 2022. “As things stand,” declares Play Fair Qatar, “more than 62 workers will die for each game played during the 2022 tournament.”

 

To repeat: more than 62 per game. Perhaps players in every match could each wear 62 black armbands. Then again, that would probably contravene Fifa’s strict rules on what constitutes official kit, infringements of which it punishes ferociously. On infringements such as mass slave death, however, the evidence suggests it is more relaxed.

But that’s Blatter for you. When he talks about football, you never really know which version of the game is going to turn up. Either it is the super-powered version, able to heal the planet. Or it’s just a lil ol’ sport, doing its best to get by in a world of forces beyond its control.

 

By way of an example of the former, Blatter was recently fluffing another dictatorship. “Honoured to meet the King and the PM of Bahrain,” he tweeted. “Very encouraged by their support of the role football can play to bring peace to the region.” To which the only possible response is: good luck with that, football! What are you going to do about Islamic State? Catch it in the offside trap?

 

Alongside such arrant cobblers runs a whole series of Fifa initiatives designed to reinforce the idea that it is Earth’s most effectively exercised soft power. Take the Football for Hope programme, where it makes participating delegations play in a tournament without referees. “Any disagreements on the pitch will be resolved through dialogue,” insists a piece of fatuous Fifa gesture politics, “a method proven to encourage personal development and mutual understanding.”

 

Maybe it could redeploy the spare match officials to stand on Qatar construction sites and raise their flags every time something looks a bit off. “Referee! This 27-year-old indentured Nepali has just DIED OF HEART FAILURE, along with 300 of his countrymen. Can we get a decision here?”

 

Typically, this would be the sort of moment that Blatter reflexively switches to that second view of football – or rather Fifa – as an essentially powerless entity. Companies “are responsible for their workers”, he has said on the ongoing Qatar disgrace, “not Fifa”.

 

His hands are tied, you see – except of course, they aren’t. We all know Fifa could change the lives of the World Cup labourers at a stroke by threatening to deprive Qatar of its precious tournament. And it goes without saying that the Qatar government is capable of working within humane labour laws: it certainly manages it in all the bits of London it has bought.

 

But neither wants to. Which brings us to the other strand of this week’s Qatar news: the detention of the BBC crew who attempted to film the labour villages and were detained by Qatari police who warned: “This is not Disneyland.” Honey, even Disneyland isn’t Disneyland, as all manner of exposés of life at the House of Mouse will attest. But at least it isn’t a slave-labour state where survival is a bonus.

 

Perhaps most telling is Qatar’s official statement offered on the BBC crew’s arrest, which begins: “The government communications office invited a dozen reporters to see – first-hand – some sub-standard labour accommodation as well as some of the newer labour villages.”

 

Isn’t there something sociopathic about that “sub-standard”? Who on earth arranges official tours to “sub-standard” venues, if they are the very people who could improve them? When human living conditions are demonstrably sub-standard, you would hope the priority would be to fix them, as opposed to inviting overseas media to fly over at an appointed date, then waiting for that date, then escorting the travelling party there and trilling something along the lines of “we’re totally going to get these guys sanitation at some point, but we just wanted to show you their sub-standard lack of it first.

 

“Anyhoo, have a quick look round their hovel, and then we must be getting back on the bus in order to make cocktails on the 170th floor of the Diamond Penis building.” Shame on the BBC for suspecting there may be a standard that is sub the official version of sub-standard.

 

As for where we go from here, identifying that magic number is becoming increasingly unavoidable. For what little it’s worth, I am in favour of sporting boycotts only in extremis, and never envy those administrators charged with making such incredibly difficult decisions. But if 62 poverty-stricken deaths per game in the richest country in the world doesn’t count as extremis, then our own FA will eventually have to tell us what does.

Edited May 20, 2015 by HanoiVillan

[MrDuck]

 

“As things stand,” declares Play Fair Qatar, “more than 62 workers will die for each game played during the 2022 tournament.”

 

Staggering statistic. Also, absolutely disgraceful that FIFA can just sit back and let it happen.

[Eames]

Swiss Police raid FIFAs hotel. Remove evidence. Arrest warrants for 5 executives apparently.

NY Times (Paywall)

[MrDuck]

Yep, they've arrested 6 FIFA officials for extradition to the US, including the FIFA vice-president

 

http://www.latimes.com/sports/la-sp-fifa-extradition-20150527-story.html

 

 

The U.S. Justice Department is expected to bring federal corruption charges against as many as 14 high-ranking members of world soccer's governing body Wednesday, following a three-year FBI investigation that could cripple Sepp Blatter's run for a fifth term as FIFA president.

 

According to CNN, an indictment against the FIFA officials will be unsealed in a New York courtroom.

The names of those charged were not released but the charges are said to include wire fraud, racketeering and money laundering, according to the Times. Swiss authorities, acting on the request of U.S. law enforcement, descended on a tony resort in Zurich overnight Wednesday to arrest several of those expected to be charged. The officials, who were attending FIFA's annual meeting, were to be extradited to the U.S., according to the New York Times, which first reported the arrests.

 

Is it too much to hope that something might finally be done about FIFA?

[Eames]

Trouble is if its not Blatter, Valcke and that group its not worth it. Picking up a couple of minor players won't change things.

[kurtsimonw]

Blatter is going to rule the World.

[villa4europe]

Trouble is if its not Blatter, Valcke and that group its not worth it. Picking up a couple of minor players won't change things.

Yep blatter will somehow spin this in to him being the man that finally ended corruption in FIFA

[MrDuck]

Keeping everything crossed that Blatter and the whole house comes tumbling down. At least it's the FBI investigating it rather than FIFA!

[kurtsimonw]

 

Trouble is if its not Blatter, Valcke and that group its not worth it. Picking up a couple of minor players won't change things.

Yep blatter will somehow spin this in to him being the man that finally ended corruption in FIFA

 

and put in place more of his mates to strengthen his position