Spotlight on Aliou after Met police raid
A suspicious transfer highlighted by the Stevens bung inquiry was behind yesterday’s police raid on Birmingham City.The early morning swoop on the Premier League club by officers of the City of London Police is the latest move in the biggest crackdown on football corruption ever mounted.
Three officers from the special unit investigating football corruption, armed with a search warrant, took away various documents after spending a hour at St Andrew’s, where they received total co-operation from the club.
The papers are understood to relate to the £300,000 transfer of Aliou Cisse from Birmingham to Portsmouth in 2004, which is one of the 17 transfers which Lord Stevens was unable to sign off following his 15-month inquiry that examined 362 Premiership transfers.
The Cisse move was negotiated by agent Willie McKay, as were two other transfers on the Stevens doubt list: Jean Alain Boumsong’s £8m move from Rangers to Newcastle in 2005 and Amdy Faye’s £2m transfer from Portsmouth to Newcastle in the same year.
The Birmingham search means the City of London Police, who say their investigation is being conducted entirely separately from the Stevens inquiry, have now pounced on all four clubs involved in those McKay transfer dealings.
Newcastle, Portsmouth and Rangers were visited last July, with police taking away computers and paperwork.
McKay, along with Portsmouth manager Harry Redknapp, Pompey chief executive Peter Storrie, former Portsmouth chairman Milan Mandaric and Senegalese player Faye are currently on bail after being arrested last November on suspicion of conspiracy to defraud and false accounting.
Tottenham defender Pascal Chimbonda, who is represented by McKay, is also on bail after being arrested in September on suspicion of conspiracy to defraud. This is understood to relate to his transfer to Wigan from French club Bastia for £500,000 in July 2005.
The pattern of the police work over the last year strongly suggests that McKay is being targeted.
But he said: “I don’t need to clear my name. This is a Quest investigation we’re talking about and they’ve followed all the paperwork through. They have cleared me of any wrongdoing on the transfers in an official statement.”
And a friend of McKay’s added: “This is a witch-hunt instigated by other agents who are jealous of Willie’s continued success in doing deals which they aren’t capable of doing.”
Quest — the investigative agency run by Lord Stevens — stood by their McKay statement regarding their inquiries over a specific two-year period of Premiership transfers.
But the City of London Police have far more powers at their disposal and have not revealed whom they have in their sights or how far back they are trawling.
Birmingham have never been under suspicion during the bung inquiry saga, which followed former England manager Sven Goran Eriksson’s allegations about Premiership corruption during the infamous ‘fake sheik’ newspaper sting.
A Birmingham statement said: “The club is co-operating fully with the police in their inquiries, which relate to an unconnected third party. No one connected with the club has been questioned or arrested.”
The Premier League passed Stevens’ 100 files of findings to the FA to bring charges if necessary.
Since then, eight of the questionable transfers have been sent to FIFA to examine, while Soho Square officials are continuing their inquires into the other nine remaining deals that weren’t signed off by Stevens.
But it is the economic crime unit of the City of London Police who continue to take the lead.
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This entry was posted on Thursday, March 20th, 2008 at 2:47 am and is filed under Sports News . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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