UPDATE: On the morning of 14 November, Belgian police searched several houses, the local FA and Court of Arbitration for Sport, in an investigation to determine the way club Royal Excel Mouscron has won a license to play in the top tier of Belgian football in the last three years.

The suspicions relate to potential forgeries, use of forgeries and fraud, according to the Federal Public Prosecutor's Office. There are also suspicions of money laundering, and Mouscron is suspected of being supported by millions of euros in illicit funding from offshore companies.

Directors at the club also faced questioning. The history of the controversial shareholder structure of the club, which Israeli superagent Pini Zahavi bought in 2015, is also under investigation. Zahavi officially exited the club in early 2016, but below we can reveal how his influence continued.







Israeli superagent Pinhas 'Pini' Zahavi's control over the Belgian football club Royal Excel Mouscron is under focus, due to newly released emails revealing he was the apparent decision-maker at the club, against the rules of the Belgian FA.

Today the Belgian club states that Zahavi - renowned for helping organise the Roman Abramovich takeover of Chelsea - has no influence over its management.

But during the 2016-2017 season this was not true, according to Football Leaks documents obtained by the German news magazine Der Spiegel, and shared with The Black Sea, De Standaard (Belgium) and their partners in the European Investigative Collaborations (EIC) network.

When he was owner of Mouscron in 2015, Zahavi transferred Romanian and Serbian players from another club, Apollon Limassol in Cyprus, where he also had a degree of control, thus overseeing a closed loop between a feeder club and receiver club.

But in January 2016, Zahavi officially sold Mouscron. This sale allowed the club to gain a license for the 2016-2017 season, as new rules by the Belgian Football Association stated that agents could not own clubs in the top Jupiler Pro League, as this was a conflict of interest.

Nevertheless, six months after Zahavi's apparent departure, the league's CEO, Pierre François, emailed Vadim Vasilyev, the vice-chairman of AS Monaco, about the business opportunities in Belgian football. At that time Monaco was looking to buy a Belgian satellite club, and François wrote to the vice-chairman about issues concerning Royal Excel (RE) Mouscron:

“It seems clear to me that RE Mouscron in its current configuration, because of the new texts of the Federal Regulations, will still have difficulties in obtaining the Licence [for the Jupiler Pro League]…I can only recommend that you start this discussion live with P.Z. rather than via intermediaries.”

Eventually Monaco would buy up fellow Belgium club Cercle Brugge, but this email reveals that, according to François, it was P.Z - Pini Zahavi - who was pulling the strings at Mouscron.