By Rob Draper for The Mail on Sunday

Sam Allardyce this week lost his job as England manager
He was caught advising fake businessmen how to circumvent FA rules
English football’s first bung inquiry was reported back in 1995
In the 21st century the model is something much more sophisticated

When English football’s first bungs inquiry reported in 1995, and the game was to be cleaned up and expunged of corruption for good, one tale especially caught the eye.
The late Ronnie Fenton, Brian Clough’s assistant at Nottingham Forest, had driven to Hull to collect £45,000 in cash which had arrived on an Icelandic fishing trawler. The allegation, reported by the commission of inquiry, was that it was a cut of transfer fee paid for Toddy Orlygsson, the Icelandic midfielder.
In retrospect it almost seems quaint and romantic in the light of the sophisticated techniques of the 21st century.

Backhanders on transfer always needed ways to avoid wire transfers which might be picked up by inquisitive tax officials or an inquisitive accountants. In the Eighties, that meant brown envelopes full of cash handed over at motorway service stations or even fishing ports.
Yet in the 21st century the model has been honed into something much more sophisticated.
These days many key figures in the game would expect to have a bank account offshore in the regime with the most-opaque regulations, such as the Cayman Islands or Bermuda. Monaco is less popular now because of pressure from the European Union to be more transparent.

It means that a manager, who is working with an agent, can agitate his chief executive to buy a player whom the manager’s agent also represents.
To secure the transfer, the agent might persuade the chief executive that the club will need to pay him, the agent, a £2million fee, as only he, the agent, can convince the player to join that club. In return, the agent would then advise the player to join the manager’s and chief executive’s club rather than a rival.
Of course, it would never be phrased that way. The fee would be described as payment for facilitating the move.

But in reality, young footballers often listen more closely to their agent for advise than their parents or partners — and so clubs know having the agent onside is key to securing a deal.
The agent in question might then reward the manager but no longer by means of a brown envelope. The £2m fee would simply be passed into the agent’s company account, which might well be based in the Cayman Islands.
The manager’s wife or son might be the beneficiary of a trust fund in the Cayman Islands which is set up in such a way as to make it impossible to see who the actually beneficiaries of the trust are.
That Cayman Islands Trust might then invoice the agent’s company for a £500,000 fee, perhaps for marketing work — and everyone will have benefited from the deal.
Except the player, of course, who really could be paid higher if there wasn’t a £2m fee required. But given that player in question might we be earning £6m a year as a result of the deal, it is often seen as victimless crime.
It is true that the Cayman Islands signed deals with the UK in 2014, which might make financial information more readily available to British authorities – but as long as tax was paid on the income, there would be no investigative issue unless there was clear evidence of fraud.
But it would require an extraordinary amount of will power to investigate with no prospect of being able prove a link between a payment and a transfer.
So even though the FA are planning to modernise their compliance rules and despite inevitable Government pressure for ‘something to be done’, the reality is that the cost and investigative skills required means little is likely to change, though the FA remain optimistic.
A spokesperson for FA Integrity Team said: ‘It is difficult for any sports body or regulator to deal with complex financial transactions in isolation, especially when they are cross border.
‘Partnership and information sharing arrangements are increasingly utilised with a range of organisations using complementary powers and jurisdictions to confront a growing range of complex integrity challenges. This approach will continue to evolve in sophistication and effectiveness.’

IMAGES: Getty Images

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