A Moroccan former major-domo for Nasser al-Khelaifi, the Qatari president of Paris Saint-Germain football club and chairman of Qatari broadcaster BeIN Sports, has filed a formal complaint with the Paris public prosecution services alleging he was illegally employed in France by Khelaifi, during which he suffered “moral harassment”, “psychological violence”, “threats” and working conditions that were “contrary to human dignity”.
The complaint filed by Hicham Karmoussi on Thursday alleges, citing a French legal term, that his employment involved “dissimulated work” and without a work permit.
The complaint appears likely to be added to an ongoing preliminary investigation by Paris prosecutors into “dissimulated work” opened in January following a similar complaint involving both Khelaifi and Qatari-owned PSG. That was filed last December by Tunisian national Hicham Bouajila, who says he worked in France as an advisor and aide to the PSG president.
Mediapart has seen both complaints and the documents submitted in support of their cases. Karmoussi, 47, and Bouajila, also 47, were officially employed – in contracts drawn up under Qatari labour law – as tennis coaches with the Smash Tennis Academy in the Qatari capital Doha. The academy was created in the early 2000s by Khelaifi who, before becoming one of the most powerful figures in world football, was once a professional tennis player.
In their separate complaints, Karmoussi and Bouajila each claim that the conditions of employment were aimed at controlling them and depriving them of their rights.
The two men allege that other employees of Khelaifi were also undeclared. In his complaint, Karmoussi said the PSG boss employed four “Philippine servants who worked illegally on French territory”. In an interview with French daily Le Monde, Bouajila claimed that other close aides of Khelaifi were employed under “disguised contracts”.
Mediapart contacted Nasser al-Khelaifi for comment about the complaints and the accusations levelled by Karmoussi and Bouajila. In a written reply, he strongly denied what he called their “lies”, and described the pair as “professional criminals” who were attempting “to manipulate the media”.
“I am staggered that so many people consider their lies and contradictions to be credible, but it’s like that in the media these days,” Khelaifi wrote, adding that the French justice system “will do its work”.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
In an interview with Mediapart last year (in French, here) Hicham Karmoussi, a former professional tennis player, recounted how he began working for Khelaifi’s Smash Tennis Academy in Doha in 2005, where he became the personal tennis trainer for the current emir of Qatar, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, who was then heir apparent. He said he became the personal assistant of Khelaifi’s in 2008.
Following the purchase of PSG in 2011 by Qatar Sports Investments (QSI), an arm of the Qatar Investment Authority, the Gulf state’s sovereign wealth fund, Khelaifi, chairman of QSI, moved to Paris to preside over PSG, accompanied by Karmoussi. The Moroccan lived for nine years in Khelaifi’s vast apartment on the avenue de Malakoff in the French capital’s upmarket 16th arrondissement, alongside the latter’s Palestinian bodyguard and an Egyptian chef. Together with his duties as major-domo of the household, he said he looked after “logistics” and aspects of Khelaifi’s private affairs. “Nasser had a secretary, but there were things that the secretary didn’t know about and which I looked after,” he told Mediapart last November.
Meanwhile, Karmoussi continued to be paid by the Smash Tennis Academy in Qatar. In May 2018, Khelaifi signed a document sent to the consular services at the British Embassy in Doha to obtain a visa for Karmoussi to visit Britain. Entitled “salary certificate”, it certified that “Mr Hicham Karmoussi […] is an employee of the Smash Tennis Academy” where “he is currently working as Tennis Coach”.
Enlargement : Illustration 2
Ever since his arrival in France in 2011, Karmoussi was given a series of successive short-term stay visas which he had to regularly renew by leaving and returning to the country, and which his Paris lawyer, Antoine Ory, said “did not permit him to work in France”.
“Nasser did that to be sure of my loyalty,” Karmoussi told Mediapart in an interview last November. “He is intelligent, he had hold of me thanks to the visas. He didn’t want me to be free and have my rights.” He said he had tried on “several occasions” to leave Khelaifi. “But he threatened me, and I had a member of my family who worked in Qatar, so I would come back.”
In 2018, the major-domo was questioned by passport control officials on two separate occasions when arriving at airports in Marseille and Paris after he was found to be travelling with expired visas. He was subsequently handed an order to leave France. It was following those events that Khelaifi gave him an employment contract, under French labour laws, with BeIN Sports, although part of his salary continued to be paid by the Smash Tennis Academy in Doha.
Karmoussi claims that he was obliged to carry out certain unusual missions, including visiting Khelaifi’s mistress in hospital in place of his employer, for reasons of discretion.
He also claimed that in October 2017, when he was visiting Morocco, Khelaifi, who was also absent from Paris, had him urgently return to the French capital to “clean up” – to remove and destroy – documents, computers and phones in the apartment. At the time, French and Swiss investigators were actively seeking evidence in a probe into the suspicions of corruption behind the awarding to Qatar the place of host nation for the 2022 football World Cup. Karmoussi said he kept some of the documents and placed them for safekeeping with two people close to him, prompting Khelaifi to sack him in 2020.
Nasser al-Khelaifi declined to comment on the details of Hicham Karmoussi’s accusations.
Hicham Bouajila, who separately filed a complaint for “dissimulated work” last December, is a Tunisian businessman. A number of documents and witness statements attest to his having worked as an advisor and aide to Khelaifi. Bouajila says he began his professional relationship with Khelaifi in 2011, when he helped the Qatari set up his base in Paris, and claims to have subsequently been involved in carrying out several “missions”, both for “sporting recruitment” and also “of a political nature”.
Contacted by Mediapart, a member of Khelaifi’s close entourage denies Bouajila’s account, and added that the Tunisian had never worked “either for BeIN, nor for PSG, nor for Nasser al-Khelaifi”.
In his complaint to the Paris prosecution services at the end of last year, Bouajila said he had assisted PSG management over a dispute with the club’s “ultra” supporters, and also a conflict with its first-team player Adrien Rabiot. He also claimed he had participated in the creation of a “Friends of Qatar” association in 2017 during the diplomatic crisis between Qatar and several Arab countries, led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, who severed diplomatic relations with the Gulf state and blockaded it.
A member of Khelaifi’s entourage said he was never involved in any of the events cited by Bouajila.
According to Bouajila, in 2015 he signed, at the behest of Khelaifi, a work contract with the Smash Tennis Academy. Mediapart has seen the document in question, which details that the Tunisian is employed as a tennis coach in Doha on an open-ended contract for a monthly salary of 30,000 Qatari riyals (currently equivalent to about 7,680 euros). “It was pure artifice,” wrote Bouajila’s Paris lawyer, Bertrand Repolt, in the filed complaint. “Hicham Bouajila has never played tennis and has never had the intention, in those conditions, of becoming a trainer in this sports practice.”
In 2016, Khelaifi signed, in his capacity as “president” of the Smash Tennis Academy, a salary certificate for Bouajila in support of the latter’s application for a visa, and which was mostly identical to that which he signed two years later for his major-domo Hicham Karmoussi.
Bouajila alleges Khelaifi distanced himself from him in 2018 following a “serious road accident” the Tunisian suffered in his home country. He affirms that his salary was only “sporadically” paid, that the PSG president did not pay “supplementary remunerations” that had been promised to him, and that mission expenses he incurred were not refunded.
Reacting to Khelaifi’s comments that Bouajila and Karmoussi were “professional criminals” who were attempting “to manipulate the media”, Karmoussi’s lawyer Antoine Ory said: “These accusations are grotesque and certainly indicate the cornering of a camp whose methods are now stripped naked.”
Contacted by Mediapart, Bouajila said “the criminals are those who torture people psychologically and physically”.
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- The original French version of this report can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse
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