World Cup 2022: Qatar’s ‘black ops’ firm helped Assad

The firm that helped Qatar undermine rival bids for the 2022 World Cup also performed PR duties for Syria’s Assad regime.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his wife Asma. Picture: AFP

The public relations executive at the centre of allegations that Qatar engaged in a dirty tricks campaign against rival bidders to host the World Cup has previously helped to burnish the image of the Assad regime in Syria.

Michael Holtzman, president of the PR consultancy BLJ Worldwide in New York, was officially employed by the Office of the First Lady of the Syrian Arab Republic in 2010. It facilitated an interview for Vogue that the magazine has since deleted from its website.

The executive, paid $US5000 ($6760) a month to help arrange the fawning interview with Asma Assad, was named by The Sunday Times as the sender of an email to a senior adviser to the Qatari bid team. The email outlined his company’s successes in recruiting academics and journalists in America and Australia “to promote negative aspects of their respective bids in the media”.

The smear campaign appears to be against FIFA’s rules, which state that bidders should avoid “any written or oral statements of any kind, whether adverse or otherwise, about the bids or candidatures of any other member association”.

Senior figures at FIFA, which announced in 2010 that Qatar had been chosen to host the World Cup in 2022, told The Times that they were concerned by the allegations but that they were “too little and too late” to justify moving the tournament. Mr Holtzman, once named “PR person of the year” by PRWeek magazine, sent an email entitled “Strategy” from the New York office of BLJ, formerly Brown Lloyd Jones, to Ahmad Nimeh, who advised the team responsible for Qatar’s bid.

Achievements included the recruitment of a group of American PE teachers to ask congressmen to oppose a US World Cup on the grounds that the money would be better spent on high school sports.

Lord Triesman, a former chairman of the Football Association, said that Qatar should lose the World Cup if it was proved to have breached bidding rules. He suggested that England could step in.

However, one senior FIFA figure, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that there would be extreme reluctance to move the tournament at this point, adding: “There is no real appetite to move it now — it is too far down the line.” Another figure, a member of FIFA’s ruling council, added that any attempt to move the tournament could leave the organisation in a costly and damaging legal battle with Qatar, which has denied all the allegations.

Qatar has already survived claims that FIFA officials were paid for votes after Michael Garcia, FIFA’s former independent ethics investigator, carried out an inquiry into World Cup bidding. The latest reports are lower down the scale but would appear to still breach bidding rules. How effective any smear campaign was at the time is debatable — it provoked little media coverage at the time.

Gianni Infantino, the president of FIFA, may use the controversy to put pressure on Qatar to agree to expanding the tournament from 32 to 48 teams and sharing some of the matches with its Gulf neighbours.

Damian Collins, chairman of the digital, culture, media and sport select committee, said that the “serious allegations” would be a breach of FIFA’s rules if proven. “It requires a proper independent investigation and FIFA should make clear that will happen,” he told BBC Radio 5.

“If the Qataris have broken the rules, they should face some sanctions.”

Qatar’s Supreme Committee for Delivery and Legacy said that it “rejected” the claims. A statement said: “We have been thoroughly investigated and have been forthcoming with all information related to our bid, including the official investigation led by US attorney Michael Garcia. We have strictly adhered to all FIFA’s rules and regulations for the 2018/2022 World Cup bidding process.”

The Times