Ali Benarbia is a familiar figure to football fans, including supporters of Manchester City in the English Premier League. The Algerian international was one of the best attacking midfielders in France's top flight of football, Ligue 1, in the 1990s. He won the league title with Monaco and then Bordeaux, before joining Paris Saint-Germain in 1999 and then Manchester City two years later. He went on to spend three lucrative years between 2003 and 2006 in Qatar before retiring from playing at the age of 37.
Ali Benarbia then remained in the gas-rich state where he became a football consultant for the television station Al Jazeera and, according to French broadcaster RFI, an advisor to the Qatar Football Association.
In June 2010 he joined the 'dream team' of football analysts and pundits on French radio station RMC alongside household names such as Luis Fernandez, Rolland Courbis and Jean-Michel Larqué. He was hired by RMC Sport and tasked with supplying regular sports content for both RMC and BFM TV, which were then part of NextRadioTV. That company was bought in 2018 by the French telecoms group Altice, founded by billionaire Patrick Drahi.
Ali Benarbia was made redundant by Altice in 2019 but until then he had been a fixture on RMC radio's flagship programme 'L'After foot' which was also rebroadcast on BFM Sport (which later became RMC Sport News then closed in June 2020). He used the opportunity to boast about the merits of the emirate. In a report broadcast in June 2017 he spoke at length about how the “World Cup[in 2022] in Qatar would be the best in history”.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
However, the French tax authorities have now added a less glorious accolade to Ali Benarbia's long list of achievements. Mediapart understands that in 2019 the former footballer was told he owed 3.95 million euros in unpaid taxes, of which 3.33 million euros related to his income as a football consultant for NextRadioTV's stations. The case was considered so serious by the tax authorities that potential criminal “proceedings” against him were discussed, according to the Ministry of Finance's tax department the Direction Générale des Finances Publiques (DGFIP) in a report written in July 2020.
According to this confidential document, obtained by Mediapart, tax investigators were able to establish that from 2013 Ali Bebarbia had benefited from the status of tax residency in Qatar, even though he was in fact living in France. To hide this he owned his French properties via an 'offshore' company in Luxembourg.
The case was also embarrassing for his employer. For at least six years NextRadioTV, and then new owners, Altice made payments to Ali Benarbia via a fictitious Qatari company which did not legally exist. Only the bank account, controlled directly by Benarbia, was real.
Had the media group made checks when its consultant asked to be paid via this Qatari company? Altice France, the owners since 2018, declined to respond on this point, simply stating that “we cannot accept any implication that the current management lacked vigilance”. Ali Benarbia was hired eight years before Altice took 100% control of NextRadioTV, the company noted.
But this argument is undermined by the fact that there had been a degree of continuity in management during and after NextRadioTV's involvement. Altice had bought a 40% stake of it back in 2015 and the founder of NextRadioTV, Alain Weill, is currently the chief executive of Altice France, which looks after the telecom and media companies in the group.
In an email to Mediapart Altice France stated that “to our knowledge, Mr Benarbia was not resident in Paris, with his appearances being made in a studio or remotely”. The group said that it had ended Ali Benarbia's contract in 2019 for “budgetary reasons” and that his departure had had nothing to do with his tax adjustment in the same year.
When approached by Mediapart, Ali Benarbia did not respond.
Enlargement : Illustration 2
The former Algerian international became the target of the French tax authorities thanks to his friendship with a man called Christophe d'Amico. He is the manager of a nightclub at Martigues near Marseille in the south of France where Ali Benarbia started off as a footballer. At the start of the 2010s d'Amico offered his services to members of the Corsican-Marseille underworld who were extorting nightclubs in the southern city of Aix-en-Provence. This led to him getting a four-year jail sentence, with two years suspended, in 2013.
Thanks to the phone taps carried out during that racketeering investigation, detectives noticed that Christophe d'Amaco also appeared to be helping his friends get hidden commissions on the transfer of footballers to Olympique de Marseille football club. That was start of the so-called 'Mercato' football transfer affair which began in 2011 and into which an investigation is still continuing.
It was also discovered that Christophe d'Amaco was very close to Ali Benarbia. “He's my best friend. I knew him as an opponent on the football pitch. We're the same age,” d'Amaco told detectives. A book called 'Les Parrains du Foot' ('The Godfathers of Football'), published by Robert Laffont, revealed that the former international footballer turned pundit had “lent” a total of 215,000 euros to Christophe d'Amico in 2010 and 2011 to finance work on the latter's house in Corsica.
The nightclub boss also used Ali Benarbia to buy duty-free luxury watches (including a Rolex for 13,700 euros) for him and some of his gangster friends. “He's domiciled in Qatar so he can take advantage of duty free,” D'Amaco told detectives.
Amaco bought the watches with cash from a jewellery store in Place Vendôme, Paris, which provided receipts in the name of Ali Benarbia. Then d'Amico went with the RMC football consultant to the airport when the latter flew off to Qatar. “Ali went through customs and got the receipt and then he gave the watches back to me,” said d'Amico. Christophe d'Amico's lawyer did not respond to Mediapart's request for an interview.
According to Mediapart's information, Ali Benarbia also offered to give his friend a bank card linked to one of his accounts in Qatar. That was revealed in the phone tap of a call made on May 28th 2011.
“It would be good, Tof, so that you're not worried, you know, the debit cards,” Ali Benarbia started to explain.
“Yes?” asks Christophe d'Amico.
“You want to pay some money with a debit card but without it being in your name … I have a debit card on a Qatar National Bank account where I can transfer money at any time and you keep that card! When you want to withdraw or whatever, you see? You do it when you want!”
“Ah, yeah, clever.”
“That'll always be of use, you never know!”
“Yeah, well, yeah!”
Investigators later sent the transcripts relating to Ali Benarbia to the tax investigation department the Direction Nationale des Enquêtes Fiscales (DNEF). The tax investigators were intrigued by this story about the Qatari debit card and began an investigation.
The DNEF investigation showed that Ali Benarbia and his wife returned to France in 2013 but continued to claim that they were resident in Qatar. They live in a “big apartment” in the 16th arrondissement or district of Paris, send their children to school in the city and are registered with the French health service. “The Benarbias were not able to produce evidence showing a regular life in Qatar,” the tax investigation report concluded.
According to this document the pair had “concealed their move to France” thanks to an offshore company in Luxembourg which owns their Parisian flat and their second home in the south of France. “All the bill contracts (water, electricity and telephone/television) are in the name of this company whose management is carried out directly by Mr Benarbia,” said the tax investigators.
Enlargement : Illustration 3
The investigators added that the former footballer had “concealed” how he carried out his work as a sporting pundit. Between 2010 and 2013, the report stated, Ali Benarbia was “employed” by NextRadioTV and declared his income in France. Then “from August 2013 he interposed a Qatari company … to hide the receipt of income from a French source”. Questioned by Mediapart, Altice France said that Ali Benarbia had not been an employee of NextRadoTV and that he was “paid via his company from 2010”.
The tax investigation, however, found out that this company did not in fact exist. It was “not registered in Qatar and he alone [Ali Benarbia] received the income from the services in an account which he held at a Qatari bank,” wrote the tax investigators. The DNEF noted that the Benarbias had “cooperated very little with the [tax] service” and that investigators had had to ask banks to identify the twenty or so accounts that the couple held in France, Qatar and Luxembourg.
In the end Ali Banarbia was ordered to pay a tax adjustment of 3.95 million euros, including penalties, of which 3.35 million relate to his income as a consultant and more than 600,000 euros to his Luxembourg company. The case may not yet be finished, either. In the report the tax authorities said they have identified in the Luxembourg company an “unidentified liability” of 1.28 million euros which “could correspond to assets featuring in a foreign account that remains unidentified at this stage”.
-------------------------
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 please go to https://www.frenchleaks.fr/ which is presented in both English and French.
-------------------------
- The original French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter