Qatar’s FIFA bribes have come home to roost. According to a whistleblower who gave the FBI details on the scam in which Qatari billionaires bribed FIFA officials to get them to assign the 2022 World Cup finals to their country, the match is likely to be moved from Qatar to another country.
The whistleblower, Phaedra Al-Majid, who was quoted in the Daily Mail, is currently under FBI protection, after supplying the agency with evidence and documents on the bribes. FIFA, according to Al-Majid, is being confronted with “overwhelming evidence” that will leave it no choice but to strip Qatar of the game, the paper quoted Al-Majid as saying.
Al-Majid had access to the information as the result of her work for the team. She was employed by the Qatari organization in 2010, when the tiny oil kingdom was awarded the 2022 game.
Al-Majid is now in hiding after her name was name was leaked as being connected to the investigation against FIFA. She retracted her accusations, but then went into FBI protective custody and recanted her retraction, which had been made only because she feared to her life and lives of her children, she said.
She added that she was motivated not by her feelings for Qatar, but by the kingdom’s lack of concern for human rights. According to many sources, workers building the stadiums and village for the games, many from Nepal, Bangladesh and India, are living in squalor and working for near slave wages. According to sources, hundreds of people have died building the project so far.
“The Qataris don’t care about human rights,” said Al-Majid. “There are human rights violations being made across Qatari society and they make promises to fix them – and they break every promise,” she told the paper. “The Qataris don’t keep their promises. They won’t keep promises on human rights. I lived there and worked there for seven years and I know that the royal family there hate one thing more than anything – being publicly shamed.”
