User:Oceanflynn/sandbox/European Investigative Collaborations

A webliography for articles related to European Investigative Collaborations

Chronological order

 * On 1 September 2013, Spanish club Real Madrid reached an agreement for the transfer of Gareth Bale. . In January 2016, Football Leaks' documents confirmed a world record transfer fee of €100.8 million (£85.1 million).In January 2016, documents pertaining to the transfer were leaked which confirmed a then-world record transfer fee of €100.8 million, eclipsing the previous record fee of £80 million (€94 million) for Cristiano Ronaldo in 2009.


 * November 5, 2015 "Since 5 November someone has been publishing different types of documents involving more or less directly the work of Doyen in football. These documents are all freely available at http://footballleaks.livejournal.com/. By doing so, the group has given us (legal scholars not involved directly in the trade) the opportunity to finally peruse the contractual structure of a TPO deal offered by Doyen and, as we purport to show in the coming weeks, to embark upon a journey into Doyen’s TPO-world."


 * Football Leaks "published private documents related to soccer clubs in Portugal, England, Spain, France, Luxembourg and Monaco, among others."
 * November 27, 2015 International Sports Law Cases published more information about "Doyen became a political (and public) scapegoat and is widely perceived as exemplifying the ‘TPOisation’ of football. This mythical status of Doyen is also entertained by the firm itself, which has multiplied the (until now failed) legal actions against FIFA’s TPO ban (on the ban see our blog symposium here) in a bid to attract attention and to publicly defend its business model. In short, it has become the mysterious flag bearer of TPO around the world."
 * November 2015 It was published on Twitter that Football Leaks had "published documents showing financial agreements between the [F.C. Twente, a professional soccer club in the Netherlands] and an agency with a variety of soccer interests, including a controversial player-investment business. The documents, which were never meant to be released publicly, appeared to portray a relationship that was at best unsavory and at worst in violation of national and international soccer regulations."


 * December 15, 2015 "Over the course of a lengthy email exchange with The New York Times, however, someone who identified himself as a leader of Football Leaks discussed the site’s background, its motivations and its intentions." In an interview with the New York Times, "John" from Football Leaks website said the organizers were concerned soccer fans based in Portugal who playing the role of watchdog. They lamented the way in which "secrecy about contracts and secret clauses" was "killing" the sport of football. Originally their goal was to "highlight improprieties among Portuguese clubs, for whom the practice of third-party ownership, or T.P.O., has long been a common way for teams to purchase high-priced players without actually having all of the necessary funds themselves." They "declined to explain how documents are obtained, but said it has at least 300 gigabytes of information and is continuously receiving more." However, because "Russian authorities rarely cooperate with Western authorities", they used Russian hosting services, servers and domains both to store information" and to "avoid shutdowns."



In April 2016 F


 * December 9, 2016 Der Spiegel "published its first in-depth piece on the new football leaks" based on "data gathered by Der Spiegel and the EIC" which includes "18.6 million documents comprising of original contracts". "This data revealed a large and uncontrolled use of murky financial operations, complex contractual networks and tax schemes in the world of professional football", "linked to the operation of the transfer market". Evidence on player contracts revealed by football leaks showed, for example, that in what has been called ‘the Cypriot scheme’ football players were bought and loaned out by the Cypriot club Apollon Limassol without ever playing for the club, or – at least in one case - without even entering the country. In so doing, the Cypriot club had taken over the role of Third Party Owner usually held by investment funds, a practice that was banned by the FIFA’s regulation from May 2015, in order to avoid, among other things, loss of control over transfer operations."


 * December 12, 2016 The Black Sea reported on Football Leaks saying that the Cypriot Club Apollon Limassol, which had the "financial backing of a company where a senior FIFA Executive Committee member is a director, appeared to be "transferring football players for non-sporting reasons".

Doyen’s TPO deals (you can dive back into the blogs here, here, here and here). Our conclusion [December 2016] was very much the same as the one advanced by the European Investigative Collaborations (EIC) The "globalized football economy" needs of "proper regulation (and regulators)."
 * December 21, 2015 International and European Sports Law published a second post in December 2015 in which they analysed contracts released by Football Leaks, in its earlier, more amateurish and more transparent iteration of its web page. The post "focused on Doyen Group (better known as Doyen Sports. The full name is Doyen Sports Investments Limited. Doyen Group a private equity fund specializing in financial speculation, advising, and managing careers of players and coaches in association football. Doyen Sports is particularly active in financing the third-party ownership of the contracts of professional footballers. From 2011 to 2016, Doyen invested €170 million in association football.


 * Merijn Rengers speaking notes on Football Leaks at the European Union


 * March 30, 2016 "Some stories can get killed without the right network" EUC was established in the fall of 2015 with founding members, including Der Spiegel, El Mundo, Médiapart, the Romanian Centre for Investigative Journalism (CRJI), Le Soir, and launched in the winter of 2016. On March 18, 2016, after three months research, they published the results of their first joint investigation spurred on by the 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris, in which they revealed how in spite of security risk warnings, "the EU’s freedom of goods policy facilitated the sale of weapons leading to [the 2015] terror attacks in Paris." In 2017 working with "over 60 journalists in 14 countries", the EIC published the Football Leaks—the "largest leak in sports history".


 * On December 3, 2016 Spiegel staff published an article on John Doe the original source for the "largest leak in the history of sports", Football Leaks.
 * On December 7, 2016 Médiapart posted "Dans les coulisses des Football Leaks" on YouTube in which Mediapart journalists interviewed Michaël Hajdenberg and Yann Philippin talking about tax evasion in the Cahuzac affair in the football. john doe source slavery


 * December 24, 2016 "Pendant trois semaines, les documents Football Leaks ont révélé les turpitudes du ballon d'or, de l'entraîneur le plus connu, de l'agent le plus puissant, du club le plus titré, du joueur le plus cher. Mais aussi les méthodes de ceux qui investissent sur un terrain miné par la corruption et les conflits d'intérêts. Une enquête judiciaire est ouverte. Cela suffira-t-il à changer les choses?"


 * August 3, 2017 transfer fee paid for the transfer of Neymar from Barcelona to Paris Saint-Germain reached €222 million (£198 million/262,992,300USD)—the most expensive association football transfer.

Related articles

 * Football Leaks


 * Investigative journalism
 * Third party ownership is ownership of a player's economic rights by third-party sources, such as football agents, sports-management agencies, or other investors. The involvement of investors in the "ownership" of players is a common practice in football, particularly in Brazil and Argentina, where many clubs are insolvent or financially limited. Businessmen or other investors buy shares in the economic rights of young players and often cover the costs of their training and accommodation. In return they are entitled to a percentage of a player's future transfer fee.

The transfer of Carlos Tevez to Manchester City for £47 million in 2009 was controversial for the part played by third-party owner Media Sports Investment (MSI).


 * Offshore Leaks
 * Panama Papers
 * Tax haven


 * Doyen Group In December 2015, International and European Sports Law published a series of blog posts by in which they analysed contracts released by Football Leaks, based on the leaks' earlier, more amateurish and more transparent iteration of its web page. The data focused on Doyen Group (better known as Doyen Sports or Doyen Sports Investments Limited, which share their London address with Doyen Capital LLP. The origin of funding for Doyen Sports or Doyen Sports Investments Limited is Doyen Capital LLP. Doyen Capital LLP is a private equity fund that  has "four shareholders: Malik Ali; Claudio Tonolla (Swiss investment and property manager, residing in Malta); Nelio Lucas and Ali Lüftü Ethem Kadirgan."

Doyen Group's financial division, Doyen Capital LLP, is based in London. Doyen Capital has the same address as Doyen Group and is headed by Nélio Lucas, Simon Oliveira, and Matthew Kay. According to information from Football Leaks, Doyen Capital LLP is the origin of funding for Doyen Sports and Doyen Sports Investments Limited, which has four shareholders: Malik Ali; Claudio Tonolla (Swiss investment and property manager, residing in Malta); Nelio Lucas and Ali Lüftü Ethem Kadirgan;

Doyen’s TPO deals (you can dive back into the blogs here, here, here and here). Our conclusion was very much the same as the one advanced by the European Investigative Collaborations (EIC) The "globalized football economy" needs of "proper regulation (and regulators)." They benefit from the trade in Third-Party Ownership (TPO) of footballers, "whereby a player’s economic rights are owned in stakes by investors". "According to the Football Leaks documents obtained by Der Spiegel and shared with the EIC, Doyen Sports operated with offshore structures between Malta, the United Arab Emirates and the British Virgin Islands." One of the creators of Football Leaks conducted an interview with Der Spiegel in February 2016 using the pseudonym John during the interview.


 * European Investigative Collaborations EIA aims to strengthen the European transnational investigative journalism by joint reporting with the utmost transparency. They exchange documents and articles and coordinate publication, and to improve the tool used in their investigations from one investigation to another—for example in their data processing capabilities, servers, secure forums, etc. At Dataharvest 2015 and other networking events, journalists from various media organizations hatched the idea for the collaboration and worked out the "essentials of the network". Stefan Candea, a founding partner explained how following the terrorist attacks, such as the November 2015 Paris attacks, journalists "started to bounce ideas off each other." This led to their first collaborative transnational investigation resulting in the series Mapping the Weapons of Terror.  The founding members of EIC—including Der Spiegel, El Mundo, Médiapart, the Romanian Centre for Investigative Journalism (CRJI), Le Soir and others— announced a the EIC, a new collaborative effort in journalism. The founding partners of the EIC network are the Germany's weekly 'Der Spiegel', Belgium's daily 'Le Soir', site  Mediapart  in France, the weekly  Falter  in Spain, the newspaper ' El Mundo in Spain, the weekly L'Espresso in Spain and L'Espresso in Portugal,   Newsweek Serbia 'in Serbia,' 'Politiken' 'in Denmark, and The Black Sea'' site in Romania. By 2017, NRC Handelsblad in the Netherlands had joined along with dozens of European media and over forty investigative journalists.


 * The Black Sea The Black Sea, led by "award winning journalists and photo-journalists from the Romanian Centre for Investigative Journalism (CRJI)", is "a web project bringing together journalists, photographers and videographers.

""That story came about after a meeting at the end of last year. The essentials concerning the network had been agreed on, so then we started bouncing ideas off each other. How easily are guns available for big terrorist attacks like the ones in Paris that at that time had just happened? And then we took it from there.""
 * [[Mapping the Weapons of Terror (March 2016)===

- Stefan Candea, EIC founding partner 2017

After three months of research On March 18, 2016, EIC journalists published "Mapping the Weapons of Terror" in which they revealed how a "shadow gun market" in East Europe fuelled "terrorism in the west, as criminal gangs use legal loopholes and open borders to traffic weapons." They revealed how in spite of security risk warnings, "the EU’s freedom of goods policy facilitated the sale of weapons leading to [the 2015] terror attacks in Paris."

Football Leaks (2016/2017)
The EIC working with "over 60 journalists in 14 countries" published a "series of articles called Football Leaks—the "largest leak in sports history". Football Leaks "led to the prosecution of football superstar Cristiano Ronaldo and coach Jose Mourinho."

Related article

 * Football Leaks