PETALING JAYA: In a shocking exposé of the multimillion-dollar football “trade” in the English football league, the Al Jazeera Investigates undercover team has revealed how English football clubs can be bought by convicted criminals and become vehicles to launder dirty money.
In the one-hour documentary that took nearly two years to investigate, the football dealmakers – who link foreign buyers with British football clubs – told undercover reporters how they could hide a criminal’s money and identity behind offshore trusts and use “dirty tricks” to deceive the football authorities.
Among the buyers whose names were revealed were Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich and previous Reading owner Anton Zingarevich.
Using secret filming, the team identified Chris Samuelson, an offshore finance expert and Keith Hunter, a former Scotland Yard detective, in the buying and selling of famous clubs such as Chelsea, Aston Villa, Reading, Hull and Derby County to Chinese and Russian buyers who were forced to hide their wealth from their governments.
Samuelson suggested to the investigating team that “its client” should consider the top six teams in the English Championship (one tier below the English Premier League or EPL) which consists of the “sleeping giants”, teams that had been in the EPL or won the title in the past.
Samuelson claims that his firm gets a 3% commission from the deals, excluding other encumbrances, and provided a step-by-step guide including transferring the monies via an offshore account held in Gibraltar.
The episode, filmed with the help of Transparency International UK, shows the team of three reporters posing as agents to buy an English club for a fictitious Chinese national who, they told Samuelson, had fled to Hong Kong after being convicted for corruption.
“Chris Samuelson also offered our fictitious criminal a new identity by purchasing a European Union passport for 10 million euros. Our undercover reporters reached the brink of striking a deal for the criminal investor to buy Derby County FC, one of England’s oldest football clubs,” Al Jazeera said in a release.
The reporters told Samuelson that the investor had smuggled money out of China via Macau casinos and had been convicted in absentia and jailed seven years for money laundering and bribery.
In response, Samuelson said: “The usual rubbish. I’m used to it. I’m in the real world and I understand all of this. I can help you, you have come to the right person.”
He named an international law firm and a chartered accountant that he works with, saying they are very discrete and have handled many of his deals in this manner.
The documentary, which premiered early this morning, tells of how Samuelson deceived the English league authorities despite the English Football League rules clearly specifying that no criminal or ex-convict should own the clubs and that buyers must show their source of funds.
When Al Jazeera contacted Samuelson’s lawyers, they claimed he was never told about the fictitious owner’s criminal convictions.
“Had he known, he would have ended the discussions immediately.”
Hunter has said he strongly disputes most of the allegations in the documentary. - FMT
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