Interpol offices, Singapore | EPA Soccer scandal How Interpol got into bed with FIFA A €20 million deal with the world’s embattled soccer federation raises questions about the law enforcement organization’s independence.

LONDON — As the investigation into corruption in world soccer grows more intense, one organization that has a €20 million deal with FIFA now finds itself in an embarrassing corner: Interpol.

Whereas corporate sponsors like Samsung and Visa pour money into FIFA’s coffers, in Interpol’s case it is the other way around: the largesse comes from FIFA. Millions of euros of soccer money flow into the law enforcement organization’s bank account each year, raising serious questions about conflicts of interest and Interpol’s impartiality.

On Monday — after insisting for several days that its collaboration with FIFA would continue as normal — Interpol quietly revealed to POLITICO that it had decided to “review” the arrangement. To many, this will seem like too little too late.

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Interpol’s deal with FIFA is just the tip of a fiscal iceberg. Since 2011, Interpol has signed deals with a large number of private “partners,” including tobacco giants, pharmaceutical firms and tech companies — such as Philip Morris International, Sanofi, and Kaspersky Lab — the proceeds of which have swollen its operational budget by almost a third.

This pecuniary relationship between international policing and big business has passed largely below the radar in recent years. Interpol enjoys an unparalleled global reputation, and as a truly international organization has largely escaped sustained journalistic scrutiny, which tends to put stories of national interest first.

In October 2013, its relationship with tobacco firms was criticized by Mediapart, a French investigative and opinion publication, and its links with the pharmaceutical industry were blasted by Die Zeit, the German weekly. But its deal with FIFA has gone mostly unexamined, particularly in the English-language media, and the issue as a whole has failed to command widespread public attention.

Now, however, given that FIFA’s dark corners are being opened to daylight by the US Department of Justice and the Swiss attorney general’s office, serious doubts are arising about Interpol’s private sector strategy, which has made the organization financially dependent upon corporate interests.

Interpol, the world’s international police organization, is responsible for coordinating operations between its 190 member countries. Rather than conduct “boots on the ground” investigations itself, it generally plays a behind-the-scenes role, providing information, expertise and leadership to combat complex multinational crimes.

Serious doubts are arising about Interpol’s private sector strategy, which has made the organization financially dependent upon corporate interests.

Its core budget, accrued from subscription payments from its members, amounts to about €60 million. Since April 2011, when Interpol’s “International Partnerships and Development sub-directorate” was established, this sum has been “topped up” with money from the private sector. In 2013 — the most recent year for which figures are publicly available — private funds boosted the core budget by 26 percent, to a total of €78 million.

The €20 million FIFA deal, concluded in 2011 and scheduled to be paid over 10 years, funded an Interpol program to provide “cutting-edge training, education and prevention to protect the sport, the players and the fans from fraud and corruption.” It focused principally on illegal betting and match-fixing.

With hindsight, the deal — the largest private donation Interpol has ever received — can only be seen as ironic: Interpol was being paid by FIFA to investigate corruption, which is the very matter for which FIFA is now under fire.

This irony is sharpened by the fact that until Friday, when Interpol agents raided the offices of an Argentine businessman accused of paying bribes to FIFA, the international police organization had played no part in the FIFA inquiry, according to Swiss police.

It wasn’t until Wednesday, the day after Sepp Blatter’s resignation and an entire week after the Zurich sting, that Interpol issued international wanted alerts for six men in connection with the FIFA case, including the organization’s former vice president, Jack Warner, and Nicolás Leoz, a former member of the executive committee.

On its Web site, Interpol states that it provides “operational support” to multinational corruption investigations, including “Corruption Response Teams” consisting of police experts in IT forensics, legal matters and other law enforcement areas, that can be “rapidly deployed to support investigations in the field.” Yet none of these services appear to have been deployed.

“Actually, it is perfectly normal for Interpol to be left out,” said David Allen, the head of the UK International Crime Bureau at Interpol. “This was a bilateral operation between the FBI and the Swiss police, so there was no reason for Interpol to be involved. Interpol only takes action when a member state requests it. The FBI would normally do it themselves.”

Did the FBI and the Swiss police keep Interpol out of the loop because of its financial relationship with FIFA? None of the law enforcement agencies involved would comment on this point.

Ordinarily, Interpol is proud of the role it plays in coordinating multinational law enforcement operations. Last June, for example, it coordinated a sting involving more than 2,200 personnel from nine police forces who seized $25.5 million of illegal medicines, arrested 102 suspects and closed down 738 illegal drug outlets. In February, it announced that thousands of tons of fake food and drink had been impounded in 47 countries as part of an Interpol-Europol coordinated operation.

By comparison to all of this, the FIFA investigation looks like an almost straightforward one for the international police organization. An Interpol staffer told POLITICO that he believed that his employer avoided the FIFA case because it did not want to endanger its revenue stream. He did not give any further details when pressed, and did not provide any hard evidence to support his claim.

Aside from the FIFA deal, the hand-in-glove relationship with the private sector offers other examples of potential conflict of interest.

Either way, aside from the FIFA deal, the hand-in-glove relationship with the private sector offers other examples of potential conflict of interest. In 2012, Philip Morris International (PMI), the American tobacco giant, donated €15 million, to be paid over a three-year period, to bankroll Interpol’s operations to disrupt tobacco counterfeiting. Later that year, Interpol was embarrassingly barred from participating in the World Health Organization (WHO) Convention on Tobacco Control because of its financial association with a tobacco company.

In 2013, Interpol and 29 of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies, including Eli Lilly and Sanofi, signed a €4.5 million, three-year deal to create Interpol’s “Pharmaceutical Crime Program” to combat production of fake medication. From Interpol’s point of view, the crime harms public health; from the industry’s point of view, it harms its bottom line. As Die Zeit pointed out at the time, “it remains unclear which of these two objectives is in the foreground.” It also was unclear whether Interpol would put much energy into investigating drug fraud affecting a company that was not a donor.

The German publication revealed that in 2011, Ronald Noble, then Secretary General of Interpol, attended a meeting of the Dolder Group, a “highly secretive think-tank of the pharmaceutical industry.” At the meeting, the paper reported, Noble said, “I have to admit that Interpol is often portrayed as a villain, who defends the interests of the industry”.

The private funding of police services is not completely without international precedent. Although a spokesperson for Germany’s Ministry of the Interior confirmed that law enforcement does not accept private money because it would “damage impartiality”, the UK police force sometimes does so, at the discretion of regional Police and Crime Commissioners and Chief Constables. For example, the “Dedicated Check and Plastic Crime Unit”, which sits within the City of London police and targets payment fraud, is sponsored by the credit card and retail banking sector.

But the depth and extent of Interpol’s reliance upon private money is striking. Not only does the inflow of cash amplify its budget significantly, but Interpol accepts a range of other “in-kind contributions” from private companies, including the secondment of staff, licensing of software and the use of equipment and buildings.

One of the largest companies to have this type of arrangement with Interpol is Kaspersky Lab, the Russian software maker that has been alleged to have “close connections” with Russian spies, and has a tense relationship with the United States.

In 2014, it signed a deal to provide intelligence, hardware and software to Interpol’s new Singapore HQ, the Interpol Global Complex for Innovation (IGCI). Less than six months later, Kapersky Lab exposed how the National Security Agency (NSA) had managed to hide spying software deep within the hard drives of personal computers in 30 countries across the world, angering the Pentagon and placing Interpol in a difficult position.

When I interviewed Jürgen Stock, Interpol’s newly appointed Secretary General, for Inside Interpol, a BBC Radio 4 documentary that takes a broad look at the organization to mark its 100th anniversary, which will be broadcast later this month, he made no apologies for Interpol’s private sector deals.

“There are many, many projects around the globe where now a police officer and a representative of private industry are sitting desk-by-desk,” he said.

Conflicts of interests, he argued, are eliminated by Interpol’s “due diligence processes and rules and regulations.”

“You cannot buy a priority at Interpol, you just can make the decision to support a specific program,” Stock said. “Many people are surprised if I tell them what Interpol’s [core] budget is. It’s around €60 million a year, which is not very much. So that’s a reason to cooperate, but [only within] a system of rules and regulations [that is] very much transparent to the public, [in order] to protect Interpol’s neutrality, integrity and reputation.

“Interpol has the tools and services available. We have our program and FIFA is supporting this program. That doesn’t mean that FIFA is dictating what we are going to do and where we are taking action… FIFA is run through a due diligence process on our side."

Interpol’s “due diligence process” did not even exist in 2011, when the FIFA deal was signed; it was codified as recently November 2014, in an Interpol General Assembly resolution on “extra-budgetary resources.” Prior to this, the criteria for agreeing a deal with a corporate donor were defined by a number of brief and generalized lines in Interpol’s constitution and financial regulations, simply stating that the donation and activities of the donor must be “compatible with the principles, aims and activities of [Interpol].”

The newly introduced due diligence process is comprised of 11 guidelines aiming to “mitigate the risks of Interpol being associated with criminals and/or criminal activities.” A “Due Diligence Officer” has the power to monitor the donor and the contribution on both a systematic and random basis. There are two levels of scrutiny, “regular,” which applies to all contributions, and “thorough,” which is used in cases where “issues of concern have been raised.”

Interpol refused to disclose whether FIFA had been subjected to a “regular” or “thorough” level of checks. But given the fact that FIFA’s long history of corruption allegations significantly predated the 2011 deal, questions must be asked about whether the due diligence procedure was ever fit for purpose.

Beginning in 2006, a succession of investigative journalists uncovered a history of bribery at FIFA stretching back to the late 1980s, mostly connected to its former marketing partner International Sports Leisure. According to a BBC Panorama program broadcast in 2010, bribes paid between 1989 and 1999 totaled about $100 million.

“FIFA’s shady past and present has been well known in international circles for a long time,” said Deborah Unger, sports corruption spokesperson for the NGO, Transparency International. “There’s no way Interpol was unaware of it when they first signed the deal with FIFA in 2011.”

Indeed, just four weeks after Interpol signed its deal with FIFA, in June 2011, it was reported that the International Olympic Committee had opened an investigation into FIFA’s honorary president, João Havelange, who was accused of accepting a $1 million bribe. This appears not to have affected Interpol’s commitment to the soccer governing body.

Even as investigative journalists drew attention to corruption within FIFA, Interpol was careful to remain supportive. In 2014, when the Sunday Times published a detailed expose of malpractice at FIFA, Interpol confirmed its general belief that “allegations of criminal corruption, wherever they occur, should be thoroughly investigated”.

However, it also published a press release stating that “the UK’s Sunday Times falsely stated that Interpol has called for a criminal inquiry into the 2022 World Cup bids. No such call was ever made by Interpol.” Alleged corruption in the 2022 World Cup selection process has since become the centerpiece of the current case against FIFA — a case which is starting to cast Interpol in a very awkward light indeed.

Jake Wallis Simons is a British journalist specializing in policy and global affairs. Inside Interpol, presented by Simons, will air on BBC Radio 4 on June 15 at 11am, and on BBC World Service thereafter.

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