The final between France and Argentina this Sunday at the World Cup in Qatar is the culmination of an operation spanning more than a decade, the icing on the cake of years of efforts to use more or less dubious methods to authoritarianally control the planetary influence of a small monarchy. rule in the Persian Gulf. The so-called Qatargate – the investigations in Belgium into alleged bribery of parliamentarians – is a reminder of the emirate’s strategy to assert its influence in the world.
The alleged Qatargate scheme is shocking at a time when the corrupt and the corrupt prefer sophisticated tax haven scams to handing over briefcases of cash. But the intent is not new.
“I’m not surprised by Qatar’s attempt to buy its influence,” said Jonathan Schanzer, vice president of the Washington-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “I am amazed at the brutality of the alleged bribe.”
If we had to look for a distant origin of the Messi-Mbappé duel, a founding moment could be November 23, 2010 at the Élysée Palace, the seat of the French Republic’s presidency. That is what French prosecutors suspect, and that is what football leaders have denounced.
The luncheon was hosted by then President Nicolas Sarkozy. The guests, UEFA boss Michel Platini; and Tamim Al Thani, then Crown Prince of Qatar and now Emir.
Is very. Qatar, a country flooded with gas thanks to gas production and geopolitical ambitions, is fighting against the United States, among others, to host the 2022 World Cup.
A star of French football in the 1980s, Platini is leaning towards the American candidacy. It is hard to understand at this point that a desert country hosts a sports competition that usually takes place in the middle of winter in the summer.
Look, after lunch Platini changes his mind. Nine days later, Qatar beat the United States in the host city poll.
“Without Sarkozy’s last-minute intervention in Platini, Qatar would never have won the World Cup,” former FIFA president Joseph Blatter told Le Monde in 2021. Platini says he decided to support Qatar before lunch.
What happened on November 23, 2010 is under the scrutiny of the National Financial Prosecutor’s Office, which opened an investigation in 2019 into “active and passive corruption”. There are currently no suspects. Prosecutors are focused on suspicions that the lunch was a “critical stage in the football championship awarding process,” according to Le Monde, citing the investigation.
“This question is whether there is a corruption pact behind the lunch,” said Élise Van Beneden, president of anti-corruption organization Anticor, who is named as a defendant in the case. Van Beneden points out that the presumption of innocence applies to named persons. He mentions operations that took place in the following months: the purchase of the Paris-Saint-Germain football club by a Qatari fund and the participation of Qatar in the French groups Lagardère and Accor, close to Sarkozy.
“The judiciary must decide whether these operations are a counterpoint to the interventions of people who were responsible for public duties,” said Anticor’s chairman. “We expect charges in the coming months.”
All this – such as the deaths of migrant workers since the 2010 World Cup was awarded, 6,500 according to calculations by The Guardian newspaper – was offset in half those weeks by the high level of sports competition, millions of audiences and acclaimed organisation. But Qatar would not have come this far without the strategy of recent years, a strategy known as soft power, that is, without the use of military force.
Bertrand Besancenot, former French ambassador to Qatar and now a senior advisor to the business news group ESL & Network, explains: “That Qatar, a wealthy country with soft power ambitions, used its financial resources to fuel something or other. … the politics of influence people use the weapons at their disposal”. And he adds: “Qatar’s weapon is money.”
Besancenot frames Qatar’s strategy in the effort that began with the father of the current emir to “put Qatar on the map”. This explains the commitment to gas, what the former ambassador calls ‘mediator diplomacy’ – for example between the Taliban and the US -, the formation of the Al Jazeera network or the World Cup itself.
“It’s a policy of perceived soft power,” adds Besancenot, lamenting that some critics of Qatar “show a kind of anger towards a prosperous, rich and dynamic country.”
Journalist Christian Chesnot, author from Qatar. Les Secrets d’une Influence Planetaire (Qatar. The secrets of a planetary influence) notes: “The problem with Qatar is that it has a mountain of money. They don’t know what to do with it. And from the moment you have ambitions, even to win the 2036 Olympics, you lobby and sometimes you break the rules and cross the red line and get caught. Others are doing it too: United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Kazakhstan, Morocco…’.
“In Washington, big money was seen as a way to buy influence,” says Schanzer of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, “though perhaps not in the form of a bribe.”
In the United States, there have been cases of major consequence, such as the resignation in June of retired General John Allen from the presidency of the Brookings Institution, a center for benchmark analysis. Allen resigned after a prosecutor’s investigation revealed that, when he had already retired from the military, he had exchanged money in favor of Qatari interests in Washington without reporting it to the official register of lobbyists, as required by law required.
Schanzer wants French President Emmanuel Macron to use his presence at Qatar’s final on Sunday to send a message to that country in the middle of Qatargate. “This alleged corruption plot was a direct attack on the democratic system of the European Union,” he says.
But Macron was already in the semifinals on Wednesday and declared: “Sport must unite”. And he added: “We have to recognize that Qatar is organizing this World Cup very well, the organization is good, the security is good. Let’s not be stingy with our entertainment. We’re in the final, it’s impressive.” According to the Europa 1 network, Platini declined the president’s invitation to participate in the game.
Source: La Neta Neta
Karen Clayton is a seasoned journalist and author at The Nation Update, with a focus on world news and current events. She has a background in international relations, which gives her a deep understanding of the political, economic and social factors that shape the global landscape. She writes about a wide range of topics, including conflicts, political upheavals, and economic trends, as well as humanitarian crisis and human rights issues.
