By Andrew Warshaw
August 7 – Time after time when quizzed on the subject, former UEFA president and later FIFA presidential candidate Michel Platini repeatedly denied suggestions he had voted for Qatar to stage the 2022 World Cup under pressure from the French government.
But seven years after the vote, then French president Nicolas Sarkozy has suddenly found himself embroiled in the ongoing criminal investigation into the 2018 and 2022 ballot process amid claims he may have benefited from multi-million-pound business deals linked to the Gulf state.
According to the Daily Telegraph, French investigators are examining whether Sarcozy took kickbacks from transactions negotiated around the time of the 2022 bid, including the sale of Paris St-Germain to Qatar Sports Investments. Last week PSG splashed out €222 million to take Neymar from Barcelona, making him the world’s most expensive player.
In 2013, a French football magazine accused Sarcozy of having “colluded” with the Qataris to get France’s support for Qatar’s bid. Now, according to unconfirmed reports, Sarcozy has been linked to a series of questionable business deals.
A spokeswoman for the French national financial prosecutor’s office told the Telegraph they were “carrying out two separate preliminary inquiries” into waste management company Veolia and the World Cup bid.
She said, however, there was no established link between the two inquiries and that Sarkozy was not “formally and personally targeted at this stage”.
A few days before the World Cup vote, Sarkozy hosted a dinner with Platini, the then crown prince and now Emir of Qatar, and other officials at the Elysee Palace in Paris. It has been widely reported that after the dinner Platini, years later banned for unrelated breaches of FIFA’s code, switched his allegiance for 2022 from the USA to Qatar.
“I knew Sarkozy wanted the people from Qatar to buy PSG,” Platini later told the Guardian. “I understood that Sarkozy supported the candidature of Qatar. But he never asked me (to vote for Qatar), or to vote for Russia [for the 2018 World Cup]. He knows my personality. I always vote for what is good for football. Not for myself, not for France.”
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