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'Thank you Nasser for your gift': when FIFA secretary general found luxury watch in his Qatar hotel room

June 14, 2020 By Yann Philippin

Shortly after a committee of world football governing body FIFA in February 2015 controversially recommended that the 2022 World Cup in Qatar could be played in winter, the then FIFA secretary general Jérôme Valcke secretly met with Qatari businessman Nasser al-Khelaifi, president of French football club PSG and chairman of beIN Sports, who was thanked by Valcke hours later for a gift of a watch worth 40,000 euros, according to phone text messages revealed here by Mediapart. Al-Khelaifi denies he was behind the gift. Swiss prosecutors, meanwhile, have dropped their probe of the two men over suspected bribery, which included Valcke’s free use of a luxurious villa bought by al-Khelaifi in Sardinia. Yann Philippin reports.

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Between 2013 and 2015, Paris Saint-Germain (PSG) football club boss and head of beIN Media Group, Nasser al-Khelaifi, showed great generosity towards Jérôme Valcke, then secretary general of global football governing body FIFA, as further detailed in this investigation by Mediapart and its media partners in the journalistic consortium European Investigative Collaborations (EIC).

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