FFA has voted for the incumbent AFC President three times
With the election for the Asian Football Confederation (AFC) Executive Committee to be held on 6 April, it is useful to give some history and context to the issues surrounding the man who has been President of AFC for the past six years and is set to continue in that role unopposed, not least because it is relevant to the recent international situation with Hakeem Al-Araibi.
When we consider Shaikh Salman Bin Ibrahim Al-Khalifa of Bahrain we must also talk of FIFA, and world and Asian football governance, because they are intertwined.
FIFA is governed by a Council of 37 people drawn from the regional confederations – of which Asia is one – and the elected FIFA President, Gianni Infantino.
As the President of a regional confederation, Salman is automatically a Vice-President of FIFA.
Salman first put his hand-up for the President of the Asian confederation in 2009.
FFA did not support him then. Instead, we voted for Mohamed Bin Hammam of Qatar – who became one of the most infamous names in world football.
But we have voted for Shaikh Salman as Asian president every time since: in 2013, 2015 and, as we know, again in 2019 at the elections next week.
Salman eventually became president of the Asian confederation in 2013 after Bin Hammam was forced out.
However, even then, without most of us knowing about the allegations of human rights abuses, there were reasons enough why Australia should not have supported his election.
Australian journalist and FIFA ethics committee member, the late Les Murray, referred Salman to the ethics committee in April 2009, stating he had evidence that Salman was buying votes for the 2009 campaign against Bin Hammam, of between USD$100,000 and $300,000 each. It was never investigated.
According to media reports in August 2009, the Bahrain football association used funding of up to USD$1.7 million to cover costs incurred by Salman in the same campaign. The publication alleged that the funds came, in part, from development monies given to the Bahrain FA from FIFA – development monies being one of the favoured ways of moving money around the football world, no questions asked. The Bahrain FA has never denied the reports, but they have attacked the individuals who wrote them. The claim was never investigated.
Salman also tried to squash a 2012 independent audit of AFC finances by PwC. That audit raised questions about possible bribery, non-transparency, tax evasion, and sanctions busting in the awarding of a $1 billion master rights agreement. Eventually, the PwC audit was leaked and it is an important document in terms of cross-jurisdictional investigation by multiple authorities.
These are all issues we knew about in 2013 and I would argue that they ought to have been enough for Australia not to support Salman then.
But clearly potential bribery and corruption were not enough to deter the previous regime at FFA from supporting him. We were told a vote for Salman was seen as being “in the best interests of football”.
The allegations of Salman’s involvement in human rights abuses arising from the Arab Spring peaceful protests, first came to my attention in 2014 when the London-based Bahrain Institute of Rights and Democracy (or BIRD) attempted to have the allegations investigated by FIFA’s supposedly new and independent ethics committee headed by US lawyer, Michael Garcia. By now, Hakeem was in Australia.
Garcia – who is now a New York Judge – was not interested. He wrote back to BIRD along the lines that allegations of human rights abuses were not within his area of responsibility. This is a man educated at a top US university, who has held senior positions in government and in swanky Manhattan law firms, and is now a Judge, who did not think human rights were relevant to his work – but Garcia is a whole other story also.
It was only towards the end of 2015 that, with the help of Hakeem Al-Araibi, we shone a light on these allegations globally.
By this time, Salman had been elected again as head of Asia for a four-year term, but his ambition now extended beyond Asia into world football.
He wanted to be FIFA President.
Backed by his good friend Sheikh Ahmad Al-Sabah of Kuwait, one of the most notorious people in world sport, and with financial support coming from a number of sources within the Gulf, Salman was one of the favoured candidates.
In parallel with the election, were some limited governance reforms being introduced to FIFA, one of which was that all FIFA Presidential and regional confederation candidates were required to undergo an integrity assessment.
Salman’s candidacy for FIFA President, with the claims of human rights abuses and other financial violations, was a litmus test for the newly-defined integrity assessment, but FIFA being FIFA – the reforms are but skin deep – he passed.
Unfortunately, at that time, despite the fact that Al-Araibi was in Australia, and the public pressure on the FIFA Presidential candidates was being led by three people worldwide, two of whom (Jaimie Fuller and the writer) are Australian, only one local journalist was interested in the Salman/Hakeem story – Simon Hill.
However, in the bigger, wider sporting world outside of Australia, the first FIFA Presidential election in 18 years without Sepp Blatter was big news, and Al-Araibi’s story was compelling – not least because Shaikh Salman was the favoured candidate.
Every one of the journalists who reported on the alleged human rights abuses, including Hill and me, received a cease and desist letter from Salman’s London law firm, Schillings.
Of course, it is important to note that Salman denied he was involved in the abuse of any individual. However, he has never actually refuted the underlying facts of the matter.
Throughout this period, FIFA was being advised by US law firm Quinn Emmanuel and PR company Teneo, and Swiss law firm Niederer Kraft Frey. The only priority of the two law firms was for FIFA to maintain its ‘victim status’ with the US and Swiss authorities who were investigating the many issues that had culminated in the May 2015 arrests and were snowballing out of their control. They held briefing sessions in the lead-up to the election to get the message out that the reforms would have to be adopted by FIFA in order to avoid losing its victim status under both US and Swiss laws.
There was also a strong view communicated in these briefings that a Shaikh Salman win would present a risk to that victim status.
In the end Salman didn’t win the FIFA Presidential election, but he came very close. In the first round of voting, he received 85 votes to Gianni Infantino’s 88. Between rounds, there was a lot of work done to ensure the 34 votes that had gone to the other candidates in round 1 were directed to Infantino, which they mostly were.
By bringing the allegations of abuse to the attention of the world in 2015, Al-Araibi and those supporting him did much to help ensure that Salman was not elected President of FIFA.
That is why Al-Araibi was at risk in his travels.
There is no doubt that if the worst had happened in Thailand, the consequences would have been horrific for Al-Araibi and why it was so imperative that, as a football community in particular but more broadly as the Australian community, we were united in ensuring that Al-Araibi was saved.
This brings us to the current situation with the news that FFA will once again support Shaikh Salman in his re-election as President of the AFC.
Not for the first time, but for the third time. 2013, 2015 and 2019.
Yet the FFA Chairman Chris Nikou – like his predecessors – states that it is in “the best interests of football” to vote for him.
Those ‘best interests’ include trying to obtain Salman’s support for the 2023 Women’s World Cup bid, and for the FFA Chairman himself to be elected to one of the nine vacant positions on the AFC executive.
I have long been on the record as saying that, regardless of whether we win or lose the women’s World Cup bid, we are hoist by our petard by participating in it, when (a) an important part of its process remains opaque, and (b) we actively court, and are dependant on, the support of Shaikh Salman as the preferred Asian bidder.
The FFA Chairman’s view is one that many have held in football for a long time – that you can do more from the inside, than outside. There is little to no evidence to support this assertion especially when it comes to Australia's relationships in the Asian region.
After all, Australia has had senior representation on the AFC executive for ten years already through Moya Dodd and members of the senior executive team of FFA have served on multiple AFC committees.
To the extent that anything has changed at FIFA or in world football governance including in Australia, it is because people on the outside went out on a limb to advocate and agitate for change, not because of anyone inside.
Sadly, it says much about the state of football governance at all levels – globally with FIFA, regionally with Asia and locally within Australia – that Shaikh Salman has no difficulty in passing the integrity test that declares him fit for election, and continues to be re-elected as head of the Asian confederation.
A man with multiple allegations against him of human rights abuses and financial malfeasance dating back to at least 2009, none of which have been investigated. A man who recused himself from Hakeem’s case in January when it is a requirement of both FIFA and AFC statutes to uphold human rights. And a man who didn’t even attend the FIFA Council meeting in Miami earlier this month, when important decisions were made about the shape and nature of future football tournaments, for reasons we can only speculate.
This is not someone we should have as a leader of football in our region. This is not someone we should support. This is not someone we should rely upon.
This is not the best interests of football.
This article is an extended version of a presentation Bonita Mersiades recently gave to a forum at the University of Technology Sydney organised by the Gulf Institute of Democracy and Human Rights. Other speakers included representatives of GIDHR, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch as well Hakeem Al-Araibi and Craig Foster.
Timeline graphic via Bonita Mersiades.
Photo of Moya Dodd, Sheikh Ahmad of Kuwait and Shaikh Salman of Bahrain via Moya Dodd on Twitter.