The prosecutor’s voice trembled. Theo Zwanziger found it difficult to control his emotions during his 90-minute general settlement on Thursday with World Cup hosts Qatar, the world association Fifa and the German Football Association (DFB). “The more I think about it, the more it hurts me,” said the former DFB president about the failed secret project “Flussbett”, with which the 76-year-old was apparently dissuaded from his critical attitude towards the World Cup in Qatar a few years ago should.
Zwanziger also suspected that Qatar could have had at least an indirect influence on the investigation into the “summer fairy tale” of the 2006 World Cup in Germany, which has not yet been clarified. In his view, numerous events such as the state proceedings and the DFB investigations into the affair were “possibly influenced by Qatar’s interests”. In any case, it was striking that the authorities involved, especially in Switzerland, had “a high degree of bias,” said Zwanziger. There, the handling of various football procedures, including summer fairy tales, has expanded into a judicial scandal.
While investigations and (discontinued) proceedings had been pursued against Zzziger and other senior officials for years, the businessman Mohamed Bin Hammam from Qatar, as the central figure in the affair, has not been questioned to this day. Ten million Swiss francs once flowed into the account of a company owned by the former Fifa vice president, who was banned for life in 2012 – the equivalent of exactly the 6.7 million euros that the DFB later transferred to the world association.
The DFB also did not give a good picture in the clarification. Zwanziger criticized that a lot had been swept under the carpet in recent years. He found it particularly striking that “everyone who came too close to the key to solving the summer fairy tale – that’s Qatar – was not rewarded for it”.
Zwanziger isn’t aiming for a deeper investigation into the secret “river bed” project, for which Qatar had provided the company of a former CIA agent with a budget of ten million dollars. He does not know whether he had direct contact with the people involved. The fact is: “I didn’t get any money.”
