Allegations of slush fund payments to secure the 2006 World Cup continued to mound yesterday as Franz Beckenbauer, the former World Cup-winning player and coach who headed Germany’s World Cup organising committee, was mentioned in a UK media report as having been personally involved in influencing the vote of Malta back in 2000.
A Mail on Sunday investigation claims that Beckenbauer played a central role in endorsing a financial inducement to Malta weeks before the FIFA vote to choose the 2006 World Cup host nation which saw Germany edge South Africa 12-11.
England was also among the candidates but after a campaign costing £10 million was subsequently eliminated after collecting two votes in the second round of the voting process.
The outcome came as a huge disappointment for the English FA who had agreed to send a star-studded national team to Malta for an international friendly in an effort to secure the vote of former Malta Football Association (MFA) president Joe Mifsud, then an influential FIFA official, at the ExCo meeting in the summer of 2000.
Beckenbauer was the president of Bayern Munich at the time and Mail on Sunday said it had obtained a secret document showing that a deal was struck in June 2000 for the Bundesliga giants to play Malta XI in a lucrative friendly at the National Stadium in Ta’ Qali.
The Mail is claiming that the contract, worth $250,000, was finalised in Malta and the money reportedly came from German media firm Kirch which had the rights to the 2006 World Cup.
“Four months after the Bayern Munich contract was signed, I was informed that $250,000 had fallen from the sky into our association’s bank account,” the Mail on Sunday quoted current Malta FA head Norman Darmanin Demajo, then the organisation’s treasurer, as saying in their report.
When Mail on Sunday asked Dr Mifsud, whose 18-year reign as Malta FA president came to an end in 2010 when Darmanin Demajo was elected to the office, for his reaction he replied: “I’ve been out of football for many years and I am not prepared to make any comment on this, either to you or anyone else.”
Successive friendlies
The South Africa bid committee also tried to leave a good impression on Dr Mifsud in the lead-up to the 2006 World Cup vote by sending their national team to play a friendly in Malta in May 2000, only a few weeks before Kevin Keegan’s England were to visit the islands.
Bayern Munich, with popular players like keeper Oliver Kahn, Stefan Effenberg, Mehmet Scholl and Giovanni Elber, played Malta XI on January 12, 2001.
Ottmar Hitzfeld’s team won a low-key match 3-1 with goals from Jens Jeremies, Elber and a Darren Debono own goal.
Nenad Veselj pulled one back for Malta XI in stoppage time.
Beckenbauer has already denied allegations of trying to buy votes in favour of the country’s 2006 World Cup bid, made first by news magazine Der Spiegel in October.
He said a transfer of 6.7m euros to FIFA in 2005 was a mistake.
“In order to get a subsidy from FIFA (for the organisation of the 2006 World Cup) those involved went ahead with a proposal from the FIFA finance commission that in today’s eyes should have been rejected. I, as president of the then organising committee, bear the responsibility of this mistake.”
But the 70-year-old said any claims of a votes-for-cash deal were not true.
“There were no votes bought in order to get the nod for the 2006 World Cup,” Beckenbauer said.
However, Der Spiegel reported a slush fund of 6.7 million euros was used to buy votes for Germany and alleged the money had been provided by then Adidas CEO Robert Louis-Dreyfus.
The German football federation (DFB) rejected the claims as groundless but has said it was investigating a payment of the same amount from the World Cup organising committee to FIFA in 2005.
DFB president Wolfgang Niersbach, who was vice president of the 2006 World Cup organising committee, acknowledged last week there were unanswered questions surrounding that payment, saying the money was demanded by FIFA’s finance committee in order to pay out a contribution of 170 million euros towards the Germans’ organisational budget.
Der Spiegel magazine claims the 2005 payment to FIFA was repaying Louis-Dreyfus for his loan five years earlier through the soccer body.