A lobbyist implicated in a spying case involving top French football side Paris Saint-Germain allegedly wanted 100 million euros from the state of Qatar in return for handing over confidential information concerning the club's Qatari president Nasser al-Khelaifi, according to a document seen by Mediapart.
The lobbyist in question is Franco-Algerian businessman Tayeb Benabderrahmane, one of the central figures in allegations of espionage carried out on behalf of PSG, along with former police officer and French intelligence agent Malik Nait-Liman. This spying affair, which has been investigated by officials from the French domestic intelligence agency the DGSI, and which involves claims that police files were illegally consulted, is now the subject of a judicial investigation. Tayeb Benabderrahmane has been placed under formal investigation in the affair for nine alleged offences, including “corruption”, “forgery and use of false instruments”, “influence peddling” and “involvement in fraudulent access to personal data”. A third man, another ex-police officer, is also under investigation. All three men benefit from the presumption of innocence.
As well as his alleged involvement in illicit private investigations on behalf of PSG, Tayeb Benabderrahmane is also said to have got hold of sensitive documents that belonged to club boss Nasser al-Khelaifi, including the contents of one of his phones and intimate videos involving his mistress.
On January 13th 2020 Tayeb Benabderrahmane was arrested in Qatar's capital Doha where he was working for the authorities and was detained and then kept in the emirate for nearly nine months. According to the Qatari authorities, he first tried to blackmail Nasser al-Khelaifi over the confidential information and then sought to sell the documents abroad. The lobbyist has denied this and suggested that his arrest and detention were linked to the fact that he supplied some of the documents to the man who employed him as a lobbyist at the time, Ali Al Marri. He is the current labour minister in Qatar and a rival of Nasser al-Khelaifi.
In order to return to France from Qatar, on July 20th that year Tayeb Benabderrahmane had to sign - “under duress” he says – a secret agreement with Nasser al-Khelaifiin in which he undertook to hand over all the documents he possessed and to keep quiet about them. The lobbyist says he was the victim of “arbitrary” detention and that his bad treatment – he was kept in a cell measuring two metres by two metres, the lights were permanently on, and he was deprived of sleep and threatened – amounted to “torture”.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
After his return to Paris on November 1st 2020 the Franco-Algerian businessman wanted to get compensation for what had happened to him. In a report seen by Mediapart, agents at the DGSI in charge of the spying investigation in France said that on his wife's phone they found messages suggesting the lobbyist wanted to ask for “several tens of millions of euros for the harm suffered [editor's note, because of his detention] and that in return he would agree never to harm Qatar's interests”.
Moreover, it appears that contrary to the secret agreement he had signed back in Qatar, Tayeb Benabderrahmane had kept a copy of the confidential data belonging to the PSG boss, information which police later found on his computer.
A USB drive and denials
“The Qatari services used violence to demand the media [editor's note, on which the information was stored]. I forgot to give them that computer,” he said during questioning in custody in France as part of the Paris-based spying investigation. “I also forgot to give them a USB drive which was at my travel agency. It was left confiscated at a notary's during my dispute with the Qatari authorities.” He added: “I don't want to give you the notary's name.”
When questioned by Mediapart Tayeb Benabderrahmane - via his wife Mahdjouba Benabderrahmane - completely denied making any blackmail attempt. She also said that her husband only “found” the USB drive at the start of May 2021, after the failure of negotiations with Qatar.
Two months earlier the Benabderrahmanes and one of their lawyers, Nabil Fadli, had created a WhatsApp group called “TB Strategy”. On March 11th 2021 the lawyer – who did not respond to Mediapart's request for comment – sent the lobbyist and his wife a message containing a proposed memorandum of agreement (MOA).
According to the terms of this document, Tayeb Benabderrahmane agreed to give up all legal action, to not challenge the protocol signed with Nasser al-Khelaifiin, and to “keep secret all the contentious information and data” belonging to him. Finally, he promised to “never cause harm to Qatar's interests or harm the reputation of the kingdom, of its institutions or top dignitaries”.
In exchange, according to this memorandum of agreement, Tayeb Benabderrahmane claimed the return of the “sum of money (900,000 euros) and of all his personal effects belonging to him that were seized in Qatar” following his arrest, plus compensation totalling 100 million euros.
This figure was broken down into 30 million euros for “lost income for the period 2019 and 2020”, 30 million to compensate for the detention, plus 40 million for a new work contract allowing him to “pursue for a period of five years his lobbying work to the benefit of the Kingdom of Qatar”. This worked out at an average of 8 million euros a year for the work. The proposal to resume working for Qatar raises questions, coming from a man who says that he was tortured during detention in that same country.
Mahdjouba Benabderrahmane insisted that her husband “rejected this memorandum of agreement” and has never claimed such “fanciful sums”. She said: “This text only commits the person who wrote it and it in no way reflects my husband's intentions.”
She added: “It was out of the question for my husband to continue working with his torturers.” According to her, the lobbyist's new contract mentioned in the text was just window dressing to “'save the Qatari's faces' by making a payment for services that my husband was supposedly going to continue to provide for the Qataris part of the compensation”.
Mahdjouba Benabderrahmane cleared Nabil Fadli, who sent the protocol and is still one of her husband's lawyers, of any blame for its contents. She said that the document was in fact written by one of his former lawyers, Olivier Pardo, who helped him both during and after his detention but who is today in dispute with the lobbyist. In February 2022 Tayeb Benabderrahmane made two ethical complaints against him to the bar council representing lawyers in Paris, and then lodged a criminal complaint.
Olivier Pardo refused to speak to Mediapart on the grounds of “client confidentiality”. But we have seen the evidence he gave as part of the complaint proceedings and which has already been revealed by the sports newspaper L’Équipe. In it, the lawyer attacked Tayeb Benabderrahmane's “sudden about-turns and evident bad faith”. He stated that the lobbyist was attacking him in this way to gain revenge for the fact that the lawyer had declined to go along with his “blackmail attempt” against Qatar.
At war with his former lawyer
According to Olivier Pardo's account in the disciplinary proceedings, the lobbyist had been “perfectly satisfied” with his services when he returned to Paris on November 1st 2020; Tayeb Benabderrahmane went to celebration his freedom at the lawyer's office, while his wife apparently sent a message thanking the lawyer for his “professionalism and support during this painful ordeal”.
Then, shortly after he was freed, Tayeb Benabderrahmane asked Olivier Pardo to launch legal action in Qatar for “torture and inhumane treatment” against his former employer, the National Human Rights Committee (NHRC) which was headed at the time by Ali Al Marri.
But the lobbyist and the lawyer started clashing after just three weeks. According to Olivier Pardo, at the end of November that year Tayeb Benabderrahmane refused to sign the lawyer's fee agreement. “He then revealed that he still had a copy of the data that was the subject of the agreement [editor's note, signed with Nasser al-Khelaifi] and that he intended to obtain a payment of several tens of millions of euros in exchange for his silence. The [law] practice took the view that it was out of the question for it to take part in any way in a negotiation of this type, one that it described as attempted blackmail.”
Tayeb Benabderrahmane denied this and said that, on the contrary, it was Olivier Pardo who tried to dissuade him from “undertaking written proceedings” against Qatar, and then refused to send the official complaint to the NHRC. He now accuses the lawyer of having pushed him, when he was in detention, into signing the out-of-court agreement with Nasser al-Khelaifi, without alerting the French authorities. Olivier Pardo, meanwhile, insisted that the lobbyist made this decision in full knowledge of the facts, because he had been accused of trying to make money out of the “stolen” data and that he risked “25 years in prison”.
In any case, the lobbyist then turned to other lawyers including Nabil Fadli and William Bourdon – the latter stopped being a member of the team after three months. Between December 2020 and February 2021 they lodged complaints with and sent reminders to several Qatari authorities, including the NHRC.
The key objective was to force Qatar to negotiate. Questioned on this by Mediapart, Mahdjouba Benabderrahmane said that legal action in Qatar was impossible until all legal avenues had been exhausted in Qatar, and that it was “extremely difficult” to win a legal action against a state. “My husband's decision to favour negotiation thus became the only way of getting around this difficulty,” she said.
She said that the situation began to change on March 1st 2021; Mahdjouba Benabderrahmane said she received a phone call that day from the top aide working for NHRC boss Ali Al Marri who said they were ready to negotiate. In a surprise move, the lobbyist and his lawyer again called on the services of Olivier Pardo, despite the abrupt split between them just two months earlier.
Mahdjouba Benabderrahmane said this was solely because Qatar demanded that Olivier Pardo carry out the negotiations. She said that he then did so by telephone on March 9th and 10th that year with the NHRC boss's top aide. That was just before Nabil Fadli sent the memorandum of agreement for compensation of 100 million euros to the Benabderrahmanes.
Olivier Pardo did not respond to Mediapart's questions on this. But during the complaint hearing he said that he had agreed to defend the lobbyist again at the start of March on condition that “this time” the latter gave up “any attempt at manipulation”. Olivier Pardo also proposed working with two other lawyers, the former president of the Bar Council Francis Teitgen and François Zimeray; they were only in the team very briefly.
According to the lobbyist's wife Mahdjouba Benabderrahmane, “no costed demand was sent to the Qataris” during the negotiations which soon failed because, she said, the emirate did not want to compensate her husband over his detention.
She said that the issue of the sensitive information was never mentioned because her husband had only “found” the USB later, at the start of May, during the “moving of items belonging to him that had been in the travel agency offices he owned”. The lobbyist informed Olivier Pardo of this discovery by email on May 10th 2021.
Shortly after the failure of these negotiations, the lobbyist and the lawyer parted company again, this time for good. Tayeb Benabderrahmane then made several complaints to legal professional bodies and started legal action in France, too, including two criminal complaints in August 2022; one aimed at Olivier Pardo and Nasser al-Khelaifi's lawyers, the other at the state of Qatar for “torture”.
Enlargement : Illustration 2
It remains to be seen what the lobbyist now plans to to with the sensitive information on the USB drive. This data is likely to be of great interest to Serge Tournaire, the judge in charge of a separate French judicial investigation into suspected corruption into the awarding of the 2022 Football World Cup to Qatar. In November this year Mediapart spoke to Nasser al-Khelaifi's former private butler Hicham Karmoussi, who said that in 2017 he had been ordered to gather and destroy documents relating to the World Cup so that they did not fall into the hands of the French and Swiss justice systems. However, the butler said he had not destroyed them all.
What is clear is that Tayeb Benabderrahmane has no intention of handing the USB drive to Nasser al-Khelaifi. His wife said that there was “compromising” data on it that relates to “PSG and [Qatari sports channel] BeIN Sport” of which al-Khelaifi is also president. But she said that it was “material … belonging to” her husband and that he had obtained the information “in the course of the tasks that he was performing for the Qatari authorities”.
This explanation is a surprising one. While at this stage we do not know the USB drive's contents, some of the data found on the lobbyist's computer does indeed belong to Nasser al-Khelaifi, including messages from his phone and also intimate videos arranged in a folder called “NAK video surveillance with his mistress”. The French investigation into alleged espionage has also established that at least some of the data was supplied to the lobbyist by Nasser al-Khelaifi's former private butler Hicham Karmoussi.
On Saturday December 3rd Nasser al-Khelaifi commented for the first time – very briefly – on the case during an interview with L’Équipe sports newspaper. “You're speaking about professional criminals,” he said. “They have changed lawyers more often than they have changed their stories and their lies. It's the ultimate media manipulation … justice will take its course.”
Tayeb Benabderrahmane, meanwhile, sees himself as a “victim” of Qatar. His wife Mahdjouba Benabderrahmane said that the “other party is clumsily distorting the truth” in wrongly portraying her husband as a “manipulator”. She said she “invites the press to … understand better the complexity of the relationships of power and influence at work in this case and not take the easy path of a scenario that some would have you believe and which has been widely relayed in the press in recent weeks in a vitriolic public relation campaign.”
-------------------------
- The original article in French can be found here.
English version and additional reporting by Michael Streeter
-------------------------
If you have information of public interest you would like to pass on to Mediapart for investigation you can contact us at this email address: enquete@mediapart.fr. If you wish to send us documents for our scrutiny via our highly secure platform SecureDrop please go to this page.
-------------------------