Forensic auditors in the Caribbean reveal that a FIFA official stole a sack full of money from the Australians bidding to host the World Cup. It’s a story of treachery, naïveté, bribery, cover-up and all those words you associate with Sepp Blatter’s bunch of Mobsters when they open the door to suckers queuing to be […]

Apelo a Blatter: Mande Marin para o Comitê de Ética da FIFA NEWSFLASH: Ivo Herzog, son of journalist Vladimir Herzog murdered by associates of Brazil’s Football President José Maria Marin, has appealed to President Sepp Blatter to refer Marin to FIFA’s Ethics Committee. In his appeal Ivo says: “President Blatter, I appeal to you to refer Jose Maria Marin to the FIFA Ethics […]

FIFA has published its annual Financial Report, six weeks ahead of their annual congress on the Indian Ocean holiday island of Mauritius. There’s no need for delegates to examine the entire 106 pages because the first fifteen confirm, relentlessly, that FIFA’s world is indeed a sunny place. As they relax on the beaches, awaiting the […]

THE REVELATION that the FBI is investigating FIFA should bring an end to three decades of institutional corruption, personified in recent times by President Sepp Blatter. I have been talking with Special Agents from the Organised Crime and Racketeering Section of the Department of Justice in Washington and with an FBI Organised Crime squad from New […]

This week saw the launch of The Great Tax Robbery, a stunning new book by ace investigative reporter Richard Brooks revealing how the richest corporations get away with paying minimal tax while ordinary folks are prosecuted if they don’t pay promptly. Buried in the back in the Acknowledgements (page 283 seeing you asked) are mentions for […]

Ten months ago Zurich journalist Jean François Tanda was commissioned to write an article describing the appalling corruption that has engulfed FIFA. His essay appeared in the April 2012 Swiss Review, a magazine published in five languages for Swiss citizens living abroad, under the headline ‘Billion-dollar colossus spiraling out of control.’ It remains a brilliant […]

Is Rupert Murdoch hoping to wrest the rights to screen the World Cup away from the BBC and ITV by sucking up to Sepp Blatter? How else to explain a programme so awful that it should have been screened as an advertorial and an invoice sent to FIFA. Last month excited executives at Sky Sport […]

There’s one word that terrifies fatcat politicians in South Africa: ‘Services.’ That’s the demand in the townships – sprawling informal settlements of tin shacks and block houses – for decent roads, piped water and sewage and safe electricity supplies. Failure to provide services provokes riots and confrontations with police. Now township dwellers are discovering that […]

Twelve years have passed since Lance Armstrong mugged me. It was in public but none of the watchers shouted ‘Stop thief!’ We were crowded in a small bookshop near Trafalgar Square in Central London. Six books had made the short list for the £10,000 Sports Book of the Year prize. Slowly, the chairman of the […]

Brazil’s Congress has moved swiftly to investigate allegations of Olympic ticket racketeering. The Tourism and Sport committee unanimously approved last week requests from Congressman Romario to invite IOC Executive Board member Patrick Hickey and Brazilian IOC member Carlos Nuzman to testify in Brasila. The cliff-hanger now is: Will they turn up? Nuzman presides over the […]

Football legend Romario, the great striker turned politician, sickened by Olympic ticket scandals, has launched a blistering campaign to force the International Olympic Committee to share control of the sale of tickets for the 2016 Rio Games. The socialist Congressman last week fired off formal requests for Olympic officials to testify to a Brazilian congressional […]

Tuesday 2 October, Brasilia:  Legendary footballer Romario, now a Socialist Deputy, called today for IOC officials Patrick Hickey and Carlos Nuzman to be invited to Brasilia for questioning by a Congressional committee about ticket deals for the Rio 2016 Olympics. Congressman Romario also wants to ask Mr Hickey about allegations that bribes have been paid […]

“We searched around the globe,” Irish Olympic Committee president Pat Hickey told the Dublin Sunday World in November last year, in his quest for the best commercial partner to sell Ireland’s allocation of tickets for the London Games. Hickey may have searched the globe – but he found the answer close to home. At home, […]

The British Government’s denial of a visa for the president of the Belarus national Olympic committee – who also happens to be the president of Belarus – was a blow to Irish IOC member Pat Hickey, always happy to overlook his pal’s favourite sports of murder, torture, corruption and vote-rigging in his day job as […]

  Brazilian legend Romario sent a video message to Andrew Jennings while filming an interview for German TV. He looked directly into the lens and said, ‘Few reporters in the world have your courage, capacity and desire to write the truth in the newspapers, on television, radios and the internet, as YOU, Andrew Jennings. ‘I […]

And then there’s the C List Royals at the IOC. You know they were chosen on merit! But have you ever head of them? This is Prince Willem of Holland (1). This is Prince Frederik of Denmark (2). Meet Prince Henri – his day job is something important in the army of Luxembourg (3). And […]

IOC member Bob Hasan from Indonesia got six years jail for racketeering after the fall of his corrupt buddy president Suharto. So he had to go. The so-called ‘green’ IOC were never bothered that billionaire Bob was the world biggest rain-forest logger. And it was goodbye to Korea’s Kim Un Yong – boss of Taekwondo […]

Reporters could have a lot of fun digging out the hilarious – and sometimes sordid – backgrounds of the ‘Olympic Family.’ Let’s start with the sponsors. Are they as pure and clean as they claim? Umm, no. There was a devastating Olympic-related story in Rolling Stone on June 12. Some Wall Street Masters of the […]

1. “Why did you not call the police when a 1.5 million Swiss Francs bribe for Joao Havelange arrived by mistake at FIFA House in March 1997? You knew that this money, due to FIFA, was being embezzled by Havelange.” 2. “Doesn’t your failure to make a police report prove that you are a criminal […]

Joao Havelange stole around US$60 million in dozens of bribes from the ISL company, money that should have gone to FIFA. But investigators have only been able to discover documentary proof for one bribe of 1.5 million Swiss Francs – around US$1 million. But I knew about this bribe 10 years ago and wrote the […]

Here we go again! The IOC defends its indefensible million-dollar earnings from sponsors who make money promoting obesity in our children – think Coca-Cola and McDonalds. Twenty years ago at the Barcelona Olympics “El Triangle”, a leading Catalan news magazine, demonstrated, graphically, how their city was being screwed by the IOC and their ‘partners’ the […]

For the last six years the BBC’s Panorama programme has been investigating corruption at FIFA, acquiring and publishing a stream of confidential documents proving beyond any doubt that Sepp Blatter was at the heart of a $100 million contract kickbacks scandal. Four richly documented programmes have been transmitted. But BBC Sport’s journalists have never asked […]

EXTRACT: There’s a private club of sports reporters who bring us the news and write about the Olympics. It is called the Olympic Journalists’ Association. Run your eye down the membership list and you’ll recognise many of the bylines from the sports pages, radio, television and the wires: Mihir Bose, David Bond, Paul Kelso and […]

It’s Closed Oyster time again! Germany’s association of investigative journalists – Netzwerk Recherche – gather in Hamburg every June to give this award to the most unhelpful and secretive person or organisation of the past year. In 2008 Andrew Jennings gave the Oration. Then the winners were German IOC member Thomas Bach and the International […]

EXTRACT: Swoosh. Ouch! Thunk, into the basket. Next. Swoosh etc. Next. Listen, it’s the soundtrack to the conception of the International Olympic Committee. Its 1789, its Paris and the mob are taking bloody revenge for centuries of exploitation. Decapitation. Europe’s elite learned some lessons – but not enough. Another wave of revolution swept across Europe […]

FIFA’s past President João Havelange took millions of dollars in bribes to steer multi-billion dollar contracts to the ISL Marketing company. His son-in-law Ricardo Teixeira took millions more. Sepp Blatter and other senior officials knew about this stealing from FIFA – and did nothing. This is the evidence revealed in a stunning document published today by […]

Anybody still want tickets for this summer’s London Olympics? The Organising Committee say they will offer another one million in early May. But you know your chances are slim. The applications will overwhelm the quantity on offer. I can help. I’ve got five thousand of them. You’ve heard about the Black Market but you don’t know […]

When FIFA general secretary Jérôme Valcke insulted Brazil in early March, saying that it needed ‘a kick up the arse’ to complete the preparations for 2014, you might have expected President Blatter to fire him for gross rudeness. When Valcke revealed in a private email last year that Qatar had “bought” the rights to host […]

It’s hardly surprising that President Sepp Blatter is desperately blocking attempts to root out corruption at FIFA. He knows that if fans and honest officials ever discover his involvement in the $100 million bribes scandal, he will be forced to resign immediately. So Blatter has been actively persuading national associations to back him at FIFA’s […]

It can’t get a lot more darkly comical. Brazil’s deeply corrupt ‘Tricky Ricky’ Teixeira quits FIFA’s ExCo and sends his resignation to Paraguay’s Nicolas Leoz, the equally corrupt president of Conmebol – the Latin-American football confederation. I was in the courthouse in Zug, Switzerland, in March 2008 when ‘Dirty Nicky’ Leoz – he’s still a […]

The Swiss Government took the extraordinary step of granting permission for Investigating Magistrate Thomas Hildbrand to travel to Paris yesterday to give a confidential briefing to a Council of Europe committee.  This is revealed in the press release and the brilliant report Good governance and ethics in sport by the Council’s François Rochebloine Hildbrand investigated […]

At the London Park Lane Hilton for the Royal Television Society Journalism Awards. Our BBC Panorama programme FIFA’s Dirty Secrets, screened on November 29, 2010, was shortlisted in the top three for ‘Scoop of the Year’ and I was shortlisted in the ‘Independent’ category. And that was it. If we’d won I was going to […]