Berlin (dpa) – Franz Beckenbauer has remained all but silent, at least in public.
“Why are you always asking me?” he liked to say with his Bavarian accent when the media once again turned to the World Cup-winning captain and coach on a football issue, and then talked.
The former bid and organizing committee chief Beckenbauer has, however, been reluctant to talk about the affair around the 2006 World Cup – and the revelations Friday spoke of more unclear payments, some of which concerning his bank accounts.
Franz Beckenbauer pictured in June 2004 as then president of Germany’s 2006 World Cup organizing committee.
The latest news came in the report of external law firm Freshfields which had looked into the affair on behalf of the German football federation DFB and questioned him twice, according to the 380-page report.
The report comes a month after Beckenbauer, a former FIFA executive, received a warning and a fine from the ethics committee of the ruling body for not cooperating with its investigation on the awarding of the 2018 and 2022 World Cups.
Beckenbauer came under fire in November when it was revealed he signed a document about “various services” with disgraced former FIFA official Jack Warner, then the chief of the CONCACAF confederation for North and Central America and the Caribbean, four days ahead of the World Cup vote in 2000.
Christian Duve of business law firm Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer speaks in Frankfurt Friday during the presentation of the investigation report on the affair surrounding the 2006 World Cup.
Now some 6 million Swiss francs are said to have been transferred from an account held with his manager Robert Schwan to a Swiss law firm, and from there to a company in Qatar named KEMCO Scaffolding, whose only partner is another disgraced ex-FIFA official, Mohamed Bin Hammam. The money was returned to a Beckenbauer account later.
Freshfields named it “surprising” that Beckenbauer said he knew nothing about these payments and “not imaginable that you don’t notice such transactions onto your own accounts.”
The revelations also seemingly contradicted earlier statements from Beckenbauer that he didn’t want to come up with his own money in what was to allegedly secure a huge World Cup grant from the ruling body FIFA with an upfront payment.
But the law firm has not been able to prove that the money was either used for vote buying or to fund the re-election in 2002 of FIFA president Joseph Blatter.
In his only interview since the affair, with the Sueddeutsche Zeitung (SZ) of November 20, Beckenbauer said: “I have always just signed everything. I even signed blindly.
“From today’s perspective some things look strange and some you would not do today. But at the time we meant everything well.”
Beckenbauer denied any kind of vote buying in the interview and insisted: “I know that I have done nothing wrong. I have tried with body and soul to bring the World Cup to Germany, which we succeeded in doing.
“I have a clear conscience. We have neither bribed anyone nor did we have a slush fund.”
But on Friday, the SZ titled online “DFB affair: the trail leads to Franz Beckenbauer,” and Die Welt said “Beckenbauer is the key figure in World Cup affair.”
