FIFA Power Broker Is Out After Years of Whispers

As a member of Trinidad and Tobago’s Parliament and its minister of works and transport, Warner appears ubiquitous, holding news conferences, hugging children and cutting ribbons at road openings, promising warehouse workers that they will soon have proper toilet facilities and dressing rooms. One recent poll named Warner the country’s most popular minister. At times, he has served as the acting prime minister. Some believe he would like the position full time.

For nearly three decades, Warner, 68, has also been a powerful but polarizing figure in regional and international soccer circles. On Monday, he resigned his positions as the vice president of FIFA, soccer’s world governing body, and as the president of soccer’s North American, Central American and Caribbean region, known as Concacaf.

He had been accused in a bribery scheme involving as much as $1 million and had been suspended from all soccer activities, charged with trying to manipulate FIFA’s presidential election June 1. His critics have long contended that Warner epitomized FIFA’s lack of accountability and transparency, reflected its outsized sense of entitlement, used soccer to enrich himself and his family and retaliated against those who opposed him.

He had endured a number of scandals through the years before stepping down Monday. He declined repeated requests for interviews in recent days and did not respond to questions submitted via e-mail. He continued to deny any wrongdoing in a statement Monday, saying he believed, “I would be fully exonerated by any objective arbiter.”

What apparently forced Warner’s hand was a preliminary investigation by FIFA’s ethics committee that was “pretty damning,” said a high-ranking regional soccer official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly. “Maybe he realized there was no way out.”

FIFA said Monday it had closed its ethics inquiry, which was conducted by the investigative agency of the former F.B.I. director Louis Freeh. FIFA also said that “the presumption of innocence was maintained.” The announcement brought widespread accusations that FIFA was trying to smother further revelations of wrongdoing as it faces tremendous international pressure to repair its tattered image.

“This shows that FIFA can’t be trusted to run their own investigation,” said Damian Collins, a member of Britain’s Parliament who has been investigating FIFA corruption. “This demonstrates that they have totally failed. This means we will never know the truth about what happened.”

The bribery allegations have also affected Warner’s political career. Under pressure from opposition leaders in Parliament, the Trinidad and Tobago Police Service has requested information from FIFA regarding the allegations. Opposition leaders have demanded an investigation to determine if the money used for reported bribe attempts came from outside the country and whether any customs laws were violated.

“There is no middle ground; you are either for Mr. Warner or against Mr. Warner,” said Brian Lewis, the honorary secretary general of the Trinidad and Tobago Olympic Committee. “His constituents think he is the best M.P. in history. His capacity for work is legendary. He’s known for giving to charity and insisting it not be publicized. He’s done a lot for football. Some others say: ‘Big criminals do the same thing. He’s getting his just desserts. He’s a scam, a fraud, always has been.’ ”

The bribery allegations stemmed from a meeting here on May 10 and 11 at the Hyatt Regency Hotel. The election for president of FIFA was three weeks away. Sepp Blatter, a Swiss, was running for a fourth term. His opponent was Mohamed bin Hammam of Qatar, the president of soccer’s Asian confederation, who had come here to pitch his candidacy to soccer officials from 25 Caribbean countries.

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As the president of Concacaf, the regional governing body, Warner controlled 35 of the 208 votes that would be made for FIFA’s presidency. He had announced that Concacaf would vote as a bloc (although the United States said it would vote independently).

“Mr. Blatter always knew that Warner was an embarrassment, but he had 35 votes,” said John McBeth, a former president of the Scotland soccer federation who accused Warner of once asking him to write a $75,000 check directly to Warner as payment for an exhibition match between Scotland and Trinidad and Tobago.

At the Hyatt meeting in May, however, Warner was not accused of asking for money. Instead, he was charged with offering $40,000 to Caribbean officials on behalf of Bin Hammam with the understanding that they would vote for Bin Hammam over Blatter. It is not known if the same offer was made to each Caribbean official. Some, though, became uncomfortable with the offer of money. According to FIFA’s ethics rules, “accepting gifts of cash in any amount or form is prohibited.”

One those who grew concerned was Fred Lunn, the vice president of the Bahamas soccer federation, according to two regional soccer officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the bribery investigation. Lunn filed an affidavit describing the incident, the officials said. Details of the affidavit were first reported by The Telegraph and The Daily Mail newspapers of London.

According to the affidavit, Lunn was handed an envelope in a conference room at the Hyatt on May 10. Upon opening it, he found $40,000 inside. He contacted Anton Sealey, the president of the Bahamas soccer federation, who told him that “under no circumstances” was he to keep the money. Lunn photographed the stacks of $100 bills and returned the cash.

The next day, May 11, Warner told the Caribbean officials the gift had come from Bin Hammam and could be used at their discretion, Lunn said in the affidavit.

An Investigation Begins
 
Chuck Blazer, an American who sits on FIFA’s executive committee and is Concacaf’s general secretary, was informed about the cash offers. For two decades, Blazer and Warner had been close allies. They had grown Concacaf from a nearly insolvent regional governing body to one with a yearly income averaging $40 million and headquarters in Trump Tower in New York. Now, the partnership fractured.

An investigation ensued at Blazer’s request. Bin Hammam dropped his candidacy for FIFA’s presidency, and he and Warner were suspended from all soccer activities. On June 1, Blatter was re-elected unopposed.

Blazer declined to speak for this article. In a brief interview last month, he said that to his knowledge, no one had paid for a vote in his 21 years as a high-ranking Concacaf official.

Warner’s resignation was a precipitous fall for the region’s most powerful soccer figure, one who rose from a poor boyhood to help orchestrate Trinidad and Tobago’s only appearance in the World Cup in 2006, making it the smallest nation (population 1.3 million) to qualify for the world’s most popular sporting event.

Trinidad and Tobago’s prime minister, Kamla Persad-Bissessar, a political ally of Warner’s, has stood by him, calling him “a son of the soil.” And he remains extremely popular in his political district, Chaguanas West, where Warner is celebrated for opening his office at dawn and helping the poor, sometimes out of his own pocket from a fortune built on travel, security, hotels and other businesses. Some of his constituents have complained that Warner was being persecuted by a Eurocentric organization because he was black, a notion he has not disavowed.

“He has a reputation as a doer, helping the dispossessed,” said Rita Pemberton, who is the head of the history department at the University of the West Indies in St. Augustine, Trinidad. “He has made the front pages of the newspapers, helping this one and that one — people whose houses were falling or dilapidated — and adopting children, the kinds of things that win you support at the ground level.”

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Yet, Warner’s soccer achievements have frequently been tempered by accusations that he has flouted FIFA’s rules of ethical behavior. At a British parliamentary hearing in May, David Triesman, who formerly headed England’s unsuccessful bid to host the 2018 World Cup, said that Warner had asked for $4 million to build an education center in Trinidad and $800,000 to purchase television rights to show the 2010 World Cup in earthquake-torn Haiti.

An independent investigation said it could not substantiate that Warner asked for the money for the education center to be funneled through him. The investigation also said that Triesman later learned that Warner already owned the World Cup television rights for Haiti. Blatter cleared Warner of wrongdoing.

While Australia bid for the 2022 World Cup — it was eventually awarded to Qatar last December — bidders spent lavishly on Warner, said Bonita Mersiades, a former head of corporate and public affairs for the Australian soccer federation. Only the 24 members of FIFA’s executive committee would vote on the World Cup bid, so each vote was considered critical. It was believed that Warner might also be able to influence Africa’s four votes on the executive committee.

Mersiades said that the Australian bid team spent $2,500 in 2009 on a single-drop pearl necklace for Warner’s wife, Maureen, that appeared to be above the allowance permitted by FIFA. (Other wives of FIFA executive committee members previously received similar pearl jewelry). Bidders also spent $250,000 to $300,000 to pay for an under-20 youth national soccer team from Trinidad and Tobago to play a 2009 tournament in Cyprus, Mersiades said. She said she understood that the money was paid through a travel agency that lists Warner and his family as directors.

Kevin Rudd, then Australia’s prime minister, was also dispatched to visit Warner in Trinidad during the bid, Mersiades said. Rudd was prepared to bring Warner an expensive bottle of wine, she said, but was warned by an Australian bid official with close ties to Warner that this was considered a disgrace and that a case of wine would be a more sufficient gift.

“One would think that Jack Warner was more important than our prime minister,” Mersiades said. She said she was fired from the Australian soccer federation in 2010 after complaining about the way its World Cup bid was operating and treating Warner.

“He is like a politician who is not particularly interested in connecting with people,” she said. “He saw himself as more important than anyone, including an ambassador hosting an event.”

FIFA said last year that it was investigating whether the pearls violated its World Cup bidding guidelines that gifts should be of symbolic or incidental value. The outcome of the inquiry was not clear. In 2009, Warner returned a $400 handbag given to his wife by England’s 2018 World Cup bid team, saying that news media comments about the gift had “resulted in the tainting of her character and mine.”

His relationship with soccer in Trinidad and Tobago often has been contentious since Nov. 19, 1989, when the island nation faced the United States in an important qualifying match for the 1990 World Cup. All Trinidad and Tobago needed was a draw to qualify, but the United States won, 1-0, reaching the World Cup for the first time in 40 years.

Defeat was compounded locally by the discovery that Warner, as the general secretary of the Trinidad and Tobago soccer federation, had oversold the permitted allotment of 28,500 tickets at Hasley Crawford Stadium. Nearly 35,000 people crammed into the stadium and thousands could not get in, creating a situation in which the aisles were packed and some people fainted.

Gally Cummings, who coached Trinidad and Tobago in that 1989 match, said that Warner asked him to say publicly that the game was not oversold. Cummings said that he declined — “The place was packed like sardines; if we had had an emergency, a lot of people would have died” — and that in retaliation, Warner had him fired and has since prevented him from getting a number of professional coaching jobs in the Caribbean.

Last year, Cummings filed a grievance against Warner with the Equal Opportunity Commission, alleging discrimination, but said the case appeared to be going nowhere.

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“He selects players, coaches, administration,” Cummings, who now coaches at the University of Trinidad and Tobago, said. “Once you’re in opposition, it’s over for you.”

After the ticket incident, Warner resigned his position as the general secretary of the Trinidad and Tobago soccer federation; in 1990, he became the president of Concacaf, the regional governing body. Until Monday, he was officially a special adviser to the Trinidad federation, though Warner was widely considered to have remained in charge.

Disagreements Over Pay

For the last five years, the Trinidad federation and Warner have been in a legal tangle with a group of players over bonuses owed from their appearance in the 2006 World Cup.

The players said that Warner agreed to pay them 50 percent of the commercial revenue that the Trinidad federation earned from the country’s appearance in soccer’s global championship. Afterward, the players said they were offered only $600 apiece. The case went to arbitration and ended up in Trinidad and Tobago’s High Court, where the players won. Last month, a preliminary payment of $1.1 million was made to be split among 13 players (others had previously settled).

Another hearing on the case is set for Tuesday. The players contend they are owed at least $3 million more and have asked to see the federation’s financial books, so far unsuccessfully.

“There has never been any sort of accountability and transparency as far as the revenues the football federation brings in; no one has any real idea,” said Shaka Hislop, a former goalkeeper who has led the players’ case. “It’s absolutely farcical that it has gone on for so long.”

The 2006 World Cup also brought another embarrassing moment for Warner. A series of articles in The Express newspaper of Trinidad and The Daily Mail of London revealed that Simpaul Travel, a travel agency owned by the Warner family, controlled World Cup tickets in Trinidad and offered them for sale at an extensive markup in travel packages, while also selling travel packages at inflated prices to matches involving England, Mexico and Japan.

Private minutes of a December 2006 meeting of FIFA’s executive committee indicate that a son of Warner’s, Daryan Warner, was fined about $1 million, only $250,000 of which had been repaid, for his role in the ticketing operation. Details of the fine were first reported in “Foul: The Secret World of FIFA” by the British investigative journalist Andrew Jennings. It is not known if the remainder of the fine was repaid or forgiven.

Nor is it likely to be known after Warner’s resignation the full extent of what he did to try to influence the outcome of FIFA’s recent presidential election.

“FIFA must continue to investigate allegations against Warner,” said Oliver Fowler, a co-founder of ChangeFIFA, a reform group. “To stop only raises more awkward questions and doubts.”

Jeré Longman reported from Port of Spain, Trinidad, and Doreen Carvajal from Paris.