Nasser Al Khelaïfi presenting Luis Enrique as PSG’s new coach.AFP7 via Europa Press (AFP7 via Europa Press)
The unveiling of Luis Enrique as the new Paris Saint Germain manager was delayed by three hours while police searched the home of the club’s president, Nasser al-Khelaifi. The ceremony to open the Asturian coaching stage in Paris, scheduled for 1:45 p.m. last Wednesday, didn’t start until 5:00 p.m. The association justified the discourtesy with an unforeseen aviation accident: the plane on board Al-Khelaifi could not take off on time, it said. The information site Mediapart provided another clue: When Al-Khelaifi landed in Paris, he found that the police were waiting for him to start “the process”. That said, the search of his home, another in the course of investigations that French prosecutors have been pushing since January, when they found plausible the facts denounced by Tayeb Benabderrahmane, a French-Algerian national who assures Al-Khelaifi, was for his responsible for ten months of kidnapping and torture in 2020.
Al-Kheaifi officials have been repeating this since the complaint was filed. The president of PSG is said to be the target of blackmail. It is, as they explained to France Info, “the victim”. Benabderrahmane tries to blackmail him by demanding millions of euros.
The story of Benabderrahmane, a self-proclaimed “lobbyist,” is a twisted one. After working for the PSG, under whose sphere of influence the police placed him, he settled in Doha before the pandemic on a salary from the Qatar Human Rights Committee. Legal and judicial sources involved in the case told the Liberation newspaper that he was deprived of his liberty in January 2020 in secret camps run by the Qatari security forces, where he remained until November. They only released him after handing him a suitcase with documents implicated al-Khelaifi in all kinds of acts, some allegedly criminal, others private in nature as they were videos with sexual content, which were apparently recorded by the surveillance camera PSG.
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Benabderrahmane said he was released after signing a protocol obliging him to keep the incident secret and not to disclose the documents. According to L’Equipe newspaper, the lawyer Olivier Pardo, Benabderrahmane’s advisor, Al-Khelaifi’s lawyer Francis Szpiner; and Rachida Dati, the Mayor of the Seventh Ward, who acted as an intermediary between all parties. In addition to enjoying excellent relations with Al-Khelaifi, Rachida Dati was Minister of Justice in the government of Nicolas Sarkozy, a key backer of the France-Qatar deals that led to the 2011 purchase of PSG by QSI, Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund. Investing in sports companies.
On his return to France, Benabderrahmane denounced that those who made it possible to sign the agreement to release him were part of a conspiracy aimed at destroying him. The coroner decided to open an investigation into a possible kidnapping with torture and extortion in an organized gang. L’Equipe reports that when questioned by the judge, Benabderrahmane said he possessed secret state documents that Al-Khelaifi and the Qatari government insisted on seizing. Last week the judge led the searches of the offices of Pardo, Szpiner and Dati33. This Wednesday, the judge ordered a search of Al-Khelaifi’s house in Paris at the same time as the presentation of Luis Enrique.
The diffuse character of PSG, a mixture of football club, multinational company and representative body of the State of Qatar, is concentrated in the character of Al-Khelaifi. This courtier, whose greatest guarantee is the friendship that binds him to Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, the emir of the country with the richest square meter in the Persian Gulf, is the visible head of the QSI. His presidency at PSG is one of the responsibilities stemming from his status as Emir’s factotum and concentration that increasingly discovers him in undesirable situations. Benabderrahmane’s complaint is the latest Chinese complaint to follow in Al-Khelaifi’s footsteps, following proceedings launched in Switzerland over alleged bribery of FIFA officials.
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