This is the ghost of “Qatargate”. At 74, Qatari businessman Mohamed Ben Hammam is actively wanted by French justice. Responsible for leading the judicial investigation into the controversial attribution of the 2022 World Cup to the gas emirate, investigating judges Serge Tournaire and Virginie Tilmont issued, in June, an international arrest warrant against from Mr. Ben Hammam, former vice-president of the International Football Federation (FIFA), learned The worldconfirming information from The Team.
According to a judicial source, this arrest warrant was issued on June 22 against the former head of the Asian Football Confederation, “implicated for acts of private corruption linked to the awarding of the 2022 Football World Cup”.
Summoned to be interviewed on several occasions, domiciled in Qatar, Mr. Ben Hammam never responded to letters from French magistrates. Silenced by both Emir Tamim Ben Hamad Al Thani and his father and predecessor, Hamad Ben Khalifa Al Thani, since his life ban in December 2012 by FIFA for ” conflicts of interest “Mr. Ben Hammam, known as “MBH”, is nevertheless the great architect of the victory in the polls of the emirate, on December 2, 2010, during the vote to award the World Cup.
Rushing into the breach opened by FIFA of the simultaneous allocation of the 2018 and 2022 editions of the World Cup, conducive to bargaining, he worked for almost two years to convince, by all means, even if it meant bribing them, his colleagues on the FIFA executive committee to vote for his country.
305,000 euros
It is mainly on the Polynesian aspect of “Qatargate” that the French magistrates are interested in MBH. The National Financial Prosecutor’s Office suspects the Qatari of having attempted to “neutralize a vote favorable to Qatar’s competitors”on December 2, 2010, by financially supporting the Tahitian Reynald Temarii, deposed president of the Oceanian Football Confederation (OFC).
Financial prosecutors consider that MBH paid, for “suspicious reasons”, the defense costs of Mr. Temarii, suspended by the FIFA ethics committee a few weeks before the vote. They suspect MBH for having encouraged Mr Temarii, who no longer had the right to vote, to appeal his sanction in order to “to block the appointment of a new representative” of the OFC, hostile to Qatar, during the attribution ballot.
In total, 305,000 euros were paid, in 2011, for Mr. Temarii’s legal fees by MBH, in two installments, notably through the Swiss account of JCB Consulting, the company of the anti-terrorism consultant and private investigator Jean- Charles Brisard, ex-husband of Géraldine Lesieur, lawyer for Mr. Temarii. The National Financial Prosecutor’s Office estimates that the talks between the Tahitian and MBH began on November 25, 2010, in Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia, during a trip financed by the Qatari to the tune of 20,000 euros.
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