[It also highlights a dynamic that empowers some FIFA officials
with outsize authority to make decisions on lucrative contracts, perhaps
prompting some to cross the line into criminal acts. One powerful soccer
official from the Caymans is accused of taking millions of dollars in bribes,
some of which was diverted to building a pool for his private residence in
Georgia.]
 |
|
Local soccer players in
the Annex, a sports facility in George Town,
on Grand Cayman Island.
Credit Angel Valentin for The New York Times
|
GEORGE TOWN,
Cayman Islands — Chickens scurried about on Friday morning as a bulldozer
spread crushed rock for a new soccer field with artificial turf at the Cayman
Islands Football Association.
It might seem
unlikely that FIFA, soccer’s world governing body, has spent $2.2 million since
2002 to build a new headquarters for the soccer association and to fund two
planned fields, given that the land is swampy and a grass field struggled to
exist in brackish conditions.
FIFA’s
generosity might seem even more improbable, considering that the Cayman
Islands, a Caribbean tax and tourist haven, is ranked 191st among the world’s
209 national soccer teams. The team has never played in a World Cup. And the entire
population of the islands, about 58,000, would not come close to filling the
world’s biggest soccer stadiums.
Yet
the field under construction illustrates one of the complex ways in which Sepp
Blatter has maintained an iron grip on power for the last 17 years as the
president of FIFA. He was elected to a fifth term on Friday.
It
also highlights a dynamic that empowers some FIFA officials with outsize
authority to make decisions on lucrative contracts, perhaps prompting some to
cross the line into criminal acts. One powerful soccer official from the
Caymans is accused of taking millions of dollars in bribes, some of which was
diverted to building a pool for his private residence in Georgia.
Under FIFA’s
system, even the smallest country has the same voting power as the biggest, and
payments from FIFA for fields and other projects — perfectly legal and
documented — help to ensure allegiance to Mr. Blatter, even as he faces
withering criticism in the face of accusations of rampant corruption in
international soccer.
The Caymans
became central to a racketeering and bribery scandal that engulfed the sport
last week. The official, Jeffrey Webb, the longtime president of the Cayman
Islands Football Association and the head of soccer’s regional governing body
for North America, Central America and the Caribbean, known as Concacaf, was
one of 14 officials indicted by the United States authorities on Wednesday. His
chief attaché, Costas Takkas, was also indicted.
Once viewed as
a reformer, and a potential president of FIFA, Mr. Webb is accused of seeking
and receiving bribes worth millions of dollars from sports marketing firms that
bought and then resold broadcast, marketing and sponsorship rights to regional
soccer tournaments. Elaborate methods were used to try to disguise the
payments, the indictment said.
Mr. Webb, 50,
is said to be fighting extradition from Zurich, where he was arrested. He has
been replaced as president of Concacaf; his downfall shocked and embarrassed
many in the Cayman Islands and elsewhere.
Tall and
athletic in appearance, Mr. Webb had an understated manner that gave him an
endearing quality as an apparent reformer, said Stephen Sigmund, a New York
public affairs consultant who assisted Mr. Webb with media training, speech
writing and publicity in 2012.
“The entire pitch was that he
was the guy who was going to clean Concacaf up rather than clean it out,” Mr.
Sigmund said.
Yet even in
scandal, the Caymans remain in some aspects as powerful as Germany, Argentina,
Brazil or any other world soccer power. Like the other 208 national soccer
federations in FIFA, the Cayman Islands gets one vote in the quadrennial
election for FIFA’s president.
Playing
Politics
Mr. Blatter’s strategy
of democratizing soccer and building up its popularity around the world — he
steered the 2010 World Cup to Africa, where the Olympics have never been held —
has also included a shrewd political component.
He has helped
build his base and assured support by earmarking payments of hundreds of
thousands of dollars a year to each of FIFA’s member federations. FIFA also
makes separate grants for construction of fields and bestows other financial
assistance — money that is indispensable to small, less wealthy nations that
are almost entirely dependent on FIFA for funding.
“Mr.
Blatter has played a very smart game,” said David Larkin, a Washington-based
lawyer who specializes in international sports and is a director of an
organization called ChangeFIFA. “The Cayman Islands represents how that
financial assistance program keeps the lights on. That means these small soccer
associations are beholden to the leaders of FIFA.”
Since 2008,
FIFA has sent grants worth $1.8 million to the Cayman Islands to build two
soccer fields. Seven years later, though, the first field remains weeks away
from completion. Plans for a dormitory and a gym have not materialized. A final
grant, for $500,000 in March 2014, was for the installation of artificial turf,
FIFA noted on its website, because “the current grass field cannot survive in
the low-level saltwater environment.”
The project
was part of a plan by Mr. Webb to invigorate soccer in the Cayman Islands with
a state-of-the-art training center. And Mr. Blatter could hardly afford to
ignore Mr. Webb, especially when Mr. Webb became the president of Concacaf in
May 2012. In that position, Mr. Webb presided over a group of 35 FIFA member
nations — about 17 percent of the total votes in FIFA’s presidential election.
“In order to
run voting blocs, you need someone to whip up your votes and keep everyone in
line,” Mr. Larkin said. “It’s classic pork-barrel politics.”
In October
2013, Mr. Blatter attended a gala dinner in the Caymans to celebrate Mr. Webb’s
election as president of Concacaf and his appointment to FIFA’s executive
committee. He was clearly a rising star. Mr. Webb was named to FIFA’s finance
committee and appointed to lead a task force to combat racism in soccer.
Even if it was
only political flattery, and a way to cement Mr. Webb’s fealty in the 2015 FIFA
presidential election, Mr. Blatter suggested at the gala that Mr. Webb might
succeed him.
Of course, Mr.
Webb needed more experience in wielding power, Mr. Blatter said, cautioning,
“Let him grow up.”
Mr. Webb, who also worked as a
banker, said that yes, he “definitely” would like to be president of FIFA one
day, telling the BBC: “It’s about giving back; it’s about serving the game. Who
knows what lies in the future?” He was known to make fun of the extravagant
Concacaf headquarters in Trump Tower in Manhattan, where Chuck Blazer, a
flamboyant former general secretary of the organization, kept an aviary for his
pet macaw.
Mr. Blazer
secretly pleaded guilty in 2013 to charges of racketeering, wire fraud, money
laundering and income tax evasion, the authorities revealed Wednesday.
Murky Finances
Concacaf has
long been plagued by murky financial dealings.
Among the 14 soccer and marketing officials indicted on
Wednesday was Jack Warner, a disgraced former president of Concacaf from
Trinidad and Tobago who is accused of, among other things, receiving a $10
million payout to influence voting on the 2010 World Cup, which was awarded to
South Africa.
As Mr.
Warner’s successor, Mr. Webb positioned himself as a reformer who would bring
accountability and transparency to Concacaf.
“We must move
the clouds and allow the sunshine in,” Mr. Webb told reporters upon his
election.
Instead, the
authorities said, business continued as usual. About the time Mr. Webb was
elected in May 2012, his indictment said, he sought a $3 million bribe from
Traffic Sports USA, a Miami-based sports marketing company that bought the
broadcast and marketing rights to qualifying matches in the Caribbean for the
2018 and 2022 World Cups.
The bribe was
solicited through Mr. Takkas, a longtime associate of Mr. Webb’s and a former
general secretary of the Cayman Islands Football Association, the indictment
said.
An intricate
scheme was used to conceal Mr. Webb’s identity as the true beneficiary of the
bribe money, the authorities said. Part of the money was paid to the account of
a contractor who built a pool for Mr. Webb at a residence of his in Loganville,
Ga.
Mr. Takkas, a
Greek Cypriot who lives in Britain, seemed to be a protector of Mr. Webb’s and
was “friendly but probing,” said Mr. Sigmund, the public affairs consultant.
“He struck me
as a type I’ve seen in politics, who attach themselves to a politician and rise
and fall with that person,” Mr. Sigmund said.
Mr. Webb
solicited another bribe for $1.1 million from Traffic Sports USA in 2012, the
indictment said, involving the commercial rights to Concacaf’s premier
international tournaments, the Gold Cup and the Champions League.
In an attempt
to conceal the bribe, the authorities said, a false invoice was used to make it
appear as if the money were being paid to a Panamanian company that
manufactured soccer uniforms and balls.
In 2013, when
Traffic Sports USA received a contract renewal worth $60 million for exclusive
sponsorship rights to the Gold Cup and the Concacaf Champions League, Mr. Webb
sought yet another payoff from the company, the indictment said.
“Though Webb wanted more, the parties eventually settled on $2
million as the size of the bribe payment,” according to the indictment.
Eventually, some of those
involved began expressing concern about the practice of paying bribes. At a
meeting in Queens in March 2014, the indictment said, Aaron Davidson, the
president of Traffic Sports USA, wondered in a conversation that was apparently
recorded: “Is it illegal? It is illegal. Within the big picture of things, a company
that has worked in this industry for 30 years, is it bad? It is bad.”
Mr. Davidson
was among those indicted Wednesday. Apparently at that same March 2014 meeting,
Mr. Davidson also raised the issue of a bribe to be paid to Mr. Webb by another
sports marketing company, Datisa, the indictment said.
That was part
of the biggest scheme described by the authorities: a plan by Datisa to pay
$110 million in bribes to a number of South American officials and to Mr. Webb
to gain the commercial rights to one of the world’s most prestigious
tournaments, the Copa America, the South American championship. A
100th-anniversary tournament is scheduled to be played in the United States in
2016.
It is not
clear what amount Mr. Webb was due to receive, but $40 million was paid out to
various recipients, the indictment said.
On May 1,
2014, the top officials of Datisa met in South Florida and discussed the
bribery scheme, the indictment said. One of the officials, an Argentine named
Alejandro Burzaco, told the others, “All can get hurt because of this subject,”
and added, “All of us go to prison.”
The
possibility that Mr. Webb might go to prison stunned many here.
He was
popular, a native of George Town, where many people are tourists and
expatriates. He moved in circles with the political elite and brought an
estimated $30 million to the local economy by drawing soccer tournaments to the
Caymans.
Mr. Webb was
said to have devoted himself so fully to developing soccer in the Caymans that
he once mowed fields and scrubbed toilets, even working in an office that had
no phones.
“I’m
surprised; it seemed like he was honest and upright,” said Violet Wilson, a Red
Cross volunteer who met Mr. Webb several times. “It’s really embarrassing. It
hurts a small island for him to hold such a big job and mess it up.”
In this insular place, news of Mr. Webb’s indictment brought
silence as well as disbelief. Government and soccer officials said little or
nothing Friday. Osbourne Bodden, the Cayman Islands sports minister, did not
mention Mr. Webb’s name in a brief statement, saying only that his ministry was
not involved in the soccer investigation. A spokeswoman for the Cayman soccer
federation removed all of her contact information from the website.
“I’ve been
asked to have no comment,” said James Rich, the administrator of the Cayman
Islands Premier League. Asked if he was shocked, Mr. Rich said: “I don’t think
shock is the right word. I don’t know the right word. Let the appropriate means
take place and see what happens.”
Because Mr.
Webb was so popular and successful, “the country hasn’t looked deeper into what
else he might have been associated with,” said David R. Legge, the owner of the
Cayman Compass newspaper. “Now that this story has broken internationally, that
is changing overnight. Scrutiny is beginning in earnest of what other
activities and who else might have been involved.”
