On Tuesday, an arrest warrant was issued in Thailand for Thaksin Shinawatra and his wife over illegal land deals in Bangkok.
On Wednesday, Richard Scudamore (the chief executive of the Premier League) sits next to Shinawatra and his posse of mercenary bodyguards for the Premiership match between Man City and Derby.
Scudamore possesses no expert inside knowledge of the corruption repeatedly perpetrated by Shinawatra in his homeland and he has studiously ignored the representations from Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International regarding extra-judicial killings. And yet, surely he is taking ludicrous risks with regard to the public perception of his and his organisation's integrity when he decides to sit alongside Shinawatra so soon after a clear legal statement of intent by the Thai authorities.
And the land deals issue is merely the tip of a very large iceberg of corruption that sloshes around the feet of the ousted Thai leader. We have itemised in numerous previous posts the illicit pocketing of government and public cash regarding business deals in Singapore and Myanmar, the explicit links between Shinawatra and the underground and illegal Far East football betting markets and money laundering using Offshore Financial Centres (OFCs).
So why is Scudamore putting his head on the line in this manner?
The early phases of the new Premiership season have seen a reassertion of control by the illegal bookmakers in Asia. The sponsorship of the referees via the Professional Game Match Officials Board (PGMOB) by Shinawatra's former company AirAsia is an edifice guaranteed to engender corruption. Shinawatra still has considerable influence within AirAsia (after all the new owners worked hand in hand with him to allow the profits from the sale to end up in inappropriate financial locations) and there is no justification for a major league global criminal to warp the betting markets and the integrity of the game of football in this manner.
Scudamore has been bought off. His mismanagement of the game has already been amply demonstrated by his behavioural patterns during the Quest/bungs inquiry and the Carlos Tevez scandal so, I suppose, we should not be surprised that the ultimate corruption of the game through links to Far East bookmakers is also on the man's agenda. Any half-competent guardian of the game would have seen that Shinawatra is not a fit and proper person to be involved in English football but half-competence is a standard that Scudamore falls far below. We possess evidence that we are unable to post due to legal advice but, suffice to say, Scudamore is in kickback territory here and we repeat our call for the termination of his contract with immediate effect. We are entitled to expect more from the authorities and regulators running the game of football.
All that we are able to expect from the other protagonists in this corruption is more of the same as their individual strategies are typical of historical behaviour. Eriksson does not do principles. He takes the dollar whatever its source and his previous authorisation of the use of Performance Enhancing Substances (PESs) for medicinal and physical advantage is well known within the game, for instance. Similarly, the bookmakers involved in this scam are hardly likely to turn away from any illicit earnings - what do bookies exist for other than to corrupt markets to their proprietary advantage? And Shinawatra is in the early throes of an election campaign to regain the Thai leadership and is using the Manchester City entity as a stepping stone towards that very end. The man has a Napoleon complex and the image of the City players being made to stand to attention behind His Excellency (just who does this criminal think he is?) to applaud his ego was particularly unpleasant. Scudamore however is supposed to be in charge of the stewardship of our game and not the establishment of infrastructures that enhance the control of bookmakers over match outcome nor the preparation of the ground for an individuals political campaign in his home country.
The reaction of many of the City fans is particularly abhorrent to any Mancunian with a sense of the political history of our great city. The warped world of these shallow excuses for humanity is astounding. Shinawatra is not Pol Pot (as some of the wilder voices have suggested) but he shares equivalence with Pinochet, for example, and he might become anything in the future if he is allowed to. Yet, the Blue Moon brigade happily ignore the blood money being used to build their team as their myopic universe is merely focused on one objective - Manchester United. It should be noted here that victories over a West Ham team involved in a betting scam and the weakest promoted team, Derby County, hardly represents a new dawn but we'll reserve judgement on the playing performances of City for another time.
Two writers clearly express this dichotomy. David Conn (one of the few perceptive mainstream journalists), writing in World Soccer magazine, states "If football clubs make their claims to lifelong loyalty, they have to embody something worth belonging to. This club [Manchester City] is not, in reality, the magical sky-blue vision of my six-year-old imagination. Manchester City is a company that belongs to Thaksin Shinawatra and his family. And so, I feel, it is not my club anymore."
Compare this with the blinkered drivel, lies and misrepresentations produced by Tim Lewis for The Guardian (see: http://football.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,2147108,00.html) and the full impact of a quasi-religious belief in a football team becomes apparent.
In conclusion, I have never been in possession of so much material and evidence regarding a particular corruption (and this, as regular readers will respect, is saying something). Shinawatra and Scudamore are a double act that make Berlusconi appear positively virtuous. Berlusconi may have done mafia but mass murder was not on his agenda.
At least Berlusconi had the decency to face down his detractors in court (so long as he had the protection of the statute of limitations, of course). Shinawatra has been assured of his safety if he returns to Thailand to face trial over the corruption charges but he has stated that he will not return. How about running the trial in a third party territory like Malaysia. The disenfranchised people of Thailand that have been murdered, imprisoned and robbed by the psychopath who is Shinawatra deserve this basic human right.
© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological
