18Sep

The Sporting Scandals of the Season

It is in the dog days of summer that the dirty deeds get done. A good habit for European and North American investigative journalists is to check government press releases at the beginning of the July 1st/4th weekend and the Friday before the Christmas Holidays. For it is then, when most people are rushing out the door for their holidays, that bad news emerges from guilty corporations, complicit government departments and cunning media spokes people. In sports corruption, the equivalent are...

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07Oct

How to Investigate Sports Corruption without upsetting the Senior Executives

Lets judge them using their own words. Today, (October 7) the Qatari-sponsored International Centre for Sports Security (ICSS) prepares to officially launch another alphabet soup of an organisation - the Sports Integrity Global Alliance (SIGA) or possibly they will announce a shift in their own organization's deck chairs while attempting to convince the sports world they should be taken seriously. The next day, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) will continue their long, slow murder of the World Anti-Doing Agency (WADA). They...

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07Sep

60 Minutes Sport, the Qataris & the Tobacco Industry

There used to be a public health phenomena called Sick Building Syndrome (SBS). Workers in Qatar The idea was that dirty ducts and air vents inside modern buildings were making people sick. In the early 1990s, SBS was linked to lung cancer, asthma and a number of respiratory diseases. Medical conferences were held. Academic journal articles were published. Media stories were written about this potentially dangerous problem. Then the non-smokers rights advocates pointed out that much of the research about SBS...

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22Feb

The Battle for the Soul of FIFA & Boris Johnson’s EU Football Nightmare

In Zurich to witness the fight that one of the candidates describes as, “the most important in the history of FIFA”. If a candidate, like Sheikh Salman of Bahrain with the human rights allegations against him, wins, the credibility of FIFA will be over. Salman is firmly in the lead with delegates officially committed. The other four candidates are battling, but it is unclear how anyone can catch Salman at this point. Here is the basic math of the election. There are...

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15Sep

Dead Catting, Image Laundering and Why You Should Have Nothing to Do with the ICSS

No independent, intelligent or credible person should have anything to do with the International Centre for Sports Security (ICSS) – the Qatari sponsored organization on sports governance and integrity. The ICSS is like the great Yiddish joke: what is the definition of chutzpah? The man who kills his mother and father and then throws himself on the mercy of the court because he is an orphan. To review: the Qataris are the people who ushered in yet another chapter of FIFA integrity...

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