As exciting as all the recent FIFA news was, there were points at which it was easy to feel a little bit lost with it all.
There were dozens of characters; there was decades of backstory. It was a bit like trying to pick Game Of Thrones up midway through Season Three. You’d find yourself so busy asking catch-up questions (“Who’s this guy again?” “What’s this prick’s deal?” “Wait, they’re brother and sister?” etc…) that it became impossible to keep up with the story as it unfolded.
Luckily for fans of institutional corruption, a brand new story looks to be starting up and it bears all the hallmarks of a classic. Cronyism, cover-ups, complicated payment contracts – the seeds of something really special. So if you want to get ahead of the game and get in on the ground floor of the next big scandal, you’ll want to take a look at Eurovision.
The web that surrounds it is not as wide-reaching nor as complex as the one surrounding FIFA, but – as far as stories about international, not-for-profit organisations which suffer from a terminal lack of transparency go – it’s looking rather promising.
Best of all, it only involves a handful of people, it’s all taken place within the last few years, and we’re talking about easy-to-comprehend six- and seven-figure sums – so we’re still at a stage where it’s relatively simple to explain.
What’s going on over there? We’ll tell you.
The Set-Up
To most Brits, the Eurovision is a silly, shiny TV song contest that happens on a Saturday night once a year. Across the rest of Europe though (and beyond) it’s still a phenomenally big deal. And behind the scenes there’s one hell of an organisation in place to make it all happen.
The Eurovision Song Contest is produced by something called the European Broadcasting Union (also known as the EBU). The EBU is made up of 72 state broadcasters from 56 different countries – including many non-European countries like Algeria, Morocco and Lebanon. These state broadcasters (like the BBC and Channel 4 in the UK) all pay an annual fee to belong to it. It’s from that huge pot of money that the EBU sets aside a multi-million pound budget each year to make the Eurovision happen.
Beyond that, the financial side of the Eurovision operation has always been shrouded in mystery, but in the last couple of months a few cracks in have started to appear.
The first crack? A person by the name of Jarmo Siim.
Smear To Help
Until recently, Jarmo Siim was the Communications Co-ordinator of Eurovision, but he has since resigned in the midst of a scandal. Though the scandal itself is actually fairly minor, it’s proving to be the loose thread that threatens to unravel the entire jumper.
Here’s what happened:
A week before the Eurovision Grand Final in May, allegations began to surface that Siim had been secretly messaging journalists, encouraging them to smear the Swedish entry (the eventual winner – Heroes by Måns Zelmerlöw) in their coverage.
The story was broken on typologies.gr, a media blog run by the Greek newspaper Paron. Greek journalists have been instrumental in uncovering this whole story (for reasons that will become apparent later) and they were the first to publish a screengrab of a Facebook message, purportedly sent by Siim, that read “between us – keep on bashing the Swedish song and put pressure on us”.
The Swedish song had already come in for a bit of a bashing from journalists without Siim’s say-so (on account of it sounding like the grizzly bastard baby of David Guetta’s Lovers On The Sun and Avicii’s The Nights) but this isn’t the bit that interested them. What really caught Typologies’ attention was the date stamp on the message.
The message was supposedly sent on April 3rd – a particularly curious bit of timing because there had been some commotion in the world of Eurovision the day before (April 2nd). An anonymous copyright claim had been brought against Måns Zelmerlöw’s music video, which had caused it to be pulled from the official eurovision.tv website.
The editor-in-chief of that website? Jarmo Siim.
You didn’t have to be David Icke to start wondering if something fishy was going on, but officials from the EBU were quick to dismiss the story as a lie and the screengrab as a fake. The top bod, Jon Ola Sand, even took the chance to malign the reputation of the journalists (which is a move straight out of the Sepp Blatter Guide to Handling The Media). What the Greeks had started though swiftly got taken up by a Swedish tabloid, Aftonbladet.
With the help of technology experts, Aftonbladet managed to verify that the message was indeed genuine and, at the very least, had definitely been sent from Jarmo Siim’s personal Facebook account.
People’s suspicions only grew when Siim was then asked outright if he had been encouraging journalists to smear the Swedish entry and the best he could muster was a distinctly wobbly “I do not recognise this quote, at this moment.”
But what, you might be thinking, does any of this matter? A mid-level Eurovision administrator tried, unsuccessfully, to damage Sweden’s chances in the competition. They still won despite his best efforts. So, really, what’s the big deal?
Well, this Jarmo Siim business doesn’t appear to be the full extent of the problem.
See Ya Later, Investigator
Normally when organisations like FIFA or the EBU – bodies which deal with significant amounts of public money – are implicated in some sort of misconduct an investigation is launched.
Such investigations can take one of two forms. It can either be an independent investigation, when an external auditor comes in to cast an eye over the details; or it can be an internal investigation, when someone from within the implicated company has a look to see where things went wrong.
Naturally, for the organisation with something to hide, the internal investigation is the investigation of choice.
FIFA has a fairly inglorious history of conducting internal investigations into its own alleged misconduct. The last time they tried it (late last year) they announced – to nobody’s surprise – to have found themselves to be entirely clear of any corrupting influences when they chose to offer the 2018 and 2022 World Cups to noted clean-dealers, Russia and Qatar. (A conclusion that the FBI and the Swiss police have subsequently decided they have a few problems with.)
For a short while, it seemed that Eurovision officials were going to do the very same thing in response to the Jarmo Siim situation. Eurovision chief Jon Ola Sand announced that an internal investigation would be held to look into these rumoured transgressions.
The man that Sand assigned to head up the investigation? Jarmo Siim’s boss, Sietse Bakker.
Sietse Bakker is the second person you need to remember – and it’s with Bakker that things start to get a little more murky. You see, not only is Bakker Jarmo Siim’s immediate boss, he is also the CEO of a PR company called Wow!Works.
Why is that relevant? Because Wow!Works currently holds a series of contracts with the European Broadcast Union worth approximately €440,000 per year.
A rather glaring conflict interest rears its head here because, in being chosen to head up this investigation, Bakker is put in a pretty tricky position. Either he will find that his employee was acting improperly (which therefore puts €440,000 of his business contracts in jeopardy); or he’ll find that his employee was innocent of any wrongdoing (which would handily protect his €440,000p/a deal, but would fly in the face of some fairly compelling evidence to the contrary).
That set-up was so suspicious, in fact, that the Swedish Anti-Corruption Institute felt obliged to pass comment on the matter.
Thankfully, this whole crisis has been narrowly averted. How? By scrapping the internal investigation altogether. Yes, on reflection, the Powers That Be decided that Jarmo Siim’s resignation was enough of a remedy to sort the situation. No-one needs to look into anything at all, or pass any further comment or judgement.
How incredibly fortunate!
But, wait. Those €440,000 worth of contracts. They sound a bit juicy, don’t they? We should probably look a little bit harder at how Sietse Bakker managed to obtain them, shouldn’t we?
One Of The Boys
Sietse Bakker’s rise to the top of the Eurovision tree has been quite a remarkable one. In the ten years that he’s been working for the European Broadcast Union, he’s been picking up job titles like they were Pokémon.
He started out as a fan – founding the internet’s first proper Eurovision fansite, esctoday.com, in 2000. Then in 2004 and 2005 he tried to enter the competition himself as a songwriter, putting forward a few compositions of his own (The Power Of An Angel and Love Is What We All Need).
But his official involvement with the competition began in 2006. As Sietse tells it, the EBU were in need of someone to make a change to the Junior Eurovision Song Contest website one year while their usual tech guys were on holiday. As Sietse’s company had already been advising the EBU’s tech guys, he was the natural choice.
The EBU were so pleased with the change that Sietse made to the site that they offered him a job the very next week: the position of New Media Manager.
From there he whipped his way up the ladder, getting himself promoted to Communications and PR Manager; then Event Supervisor of Eurovision, Supervisor of Junior Eurovision and the Supervisor of (the now-defunct) Eurovision Dance.
What’s strange though is that, although his CV is littered with practically every job that the Eurovision has to offer, the EBU’s official line is that Sietse Bakker is not – and has never been – employed by them.
Sietse Bakker’s LinkedIn profile begs to differ however…
Of course, this is just a technicality on the EBU’s part. They do employ him, just not directly. Bakker is directly employed by Wow!Works, and the EBU employs the services of Wow!Works.
And what exactly does the EBU employ Wow!Works to do?
The first contract they have has been the bread-and-butter deal for a few years now. It is made out for ‘Web Services’ (which includes the maintenance of the official eurovision.tv website – Jarmo Siim’s old beat) for which Wow!Works receives €321,955 per year.
The second is a new invoice on the books. Written out to the tune of €120,000, it was first paid in 2014 to Wow!Works as remuneration for ‘Consultancy’ services provided.
€321,955 may not seem like an outrageous sum to pay a consultancy firm to manage a website. €120,000 might not be a wildly excessive fee to pay for a consultant either. The problem is that these are sums of money that none of the contributing broadcasters have any say about.
While broadcasters like the BBC (which doesn’t have a greatest track record of getting value for money from its IT projects) aren’t likely to raise a red flag at these sorts of figures, not everyone in Europe can be so blasé about this sort of thing. What about the publicly funded broadcasters in countries like Greece?
Greece’s publicly funded broadcaster has been having a rotten time of it recently – shut down, replaced, reinstated – all because of their fucked economy. Given that, you’d can see why they’d be interested to ensure that every last Euro they pay is spent in the most efficient manner possible. They’d also be pretty glad of any jobs going, if there were any on offer.
Which is why Paron journalist George Myrinos decided to ask the guy who signs off all these contracts if there was any sort of competitive tender process in place for the provision of these services.
And, would you believe it – no, there isn’t!
Despite a number of countries having to pull out of the competition due to financial concerns (Ukraine, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Luxembourg, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Portugal to mention just a few from recent years) it seems that ‘Web Services’ and ‘Consultancy’ are just too important to consider revising their budgets.
In fact, according to Dr Frank-Deiter Freiling (the Chairman of the Reference Group of the Eurovision Song Contest and the man whose signature is at the bottom of the contracts), the EBU feels it would actually be more expensive to put the work out to international tender because of all the applications they’d have to process.
Seems like money is quite tight at the EBU – yet, somehow, they managed to find the money to start paying Sietse Bakker’s company an extra €120,000 a year, despite his job and remit not having changed.
(The official explanation for the new €120,000 invoice is that Bakker had apparently been providing the same consultancy services to the EBU in previous years as a ‘courtesy’ – giving 1,400 hours of his rather expensive time pro-bono in 2011, 2012 and 2013.)
Still, Dr Freiling is confident that the ex-fanboy, wannabe entry and long-time friend of Eurovision’s inner circle is definitely the best and most cost-effective option out there – so we’ll just have to trust him that it’s all money well spent.
Bad Planning
One of the other things that FIFA is famed for is its habit of going into a country, getting them to spend billions of their taxpayers’ cash to get their cities ready for an international football competition, and then waltzing back out again, keeping a disproportionately massive percentage of the profits for themselves.
Take last year’s World Cup for example. Brazil was estimated to have spent $15 billion on getting the country ready for their hosting duties – a significant chunk of which was public money.
How much did FIFA chip in towards Brazil’s bill? $553 million ($453 million to local organisations in the run-up and a $100 million ‘legacy’ payment once it was all over).
How much did FIFA pocket from TV rights, sponsorship and other licensing? About $4.8 billion.
While the situation with Eurovision is nowhere near the same scale, it still works along similar lines.
Now that roughly 40 countries are involved each year, the competition isn’t quite the tinpot little singalong it was in the 1990s. Yes, the EBU is taking participation fees from more countries than ever before, but the growth of the competition is having huge repercussions on the host nations. Now that semi-finals are a necessity for the competition to work (to whittle down the 40 possible contestants to a manageable 25 for the final) it means that the host nation now has to stage three shows instead of one.
Not only that, they have to provide space for 40 delegations – nearly twice the number they had to accommodate in 2000. They have to provide space for more journalists, more TV crews and, crucially, thousands more fans from more and more countries.
This increase isn’t just pie-in-the-sky hypothetical stuff. It has real-world implications.
Denmark ended up spending well over their allocated budget on putting on the competition last year. What was supposed to cost about €30m ended up costing them €45m. Things got so bad that the National Audit Office was called in to investigate and, to make up for the €15m shortfall (which was public money) they had to let go 10% of the staff at the tourism authority Wonderful Copenhagen.
Now obviously the EBU can’t be held responsible for this spectacular show of financial mismanagement in Denmark. They didn’t force Denmark to overspend so massively, but while the growing onus of hosting the show of this falls to the individual country, the profits of the show are going to the EBU.
Just like FIFA, the EBU is simply standing by as the nations find extra amounts of cash to cover the increasing costs of this circus and then leaving with the loot.
Silence Is Golden
The case against FIFA had been brewing for 24 years before the story was finally bust open. A lot of armchair commentators were surprised it all took so long – you know, given that everyone knew that FIFA was rotten to the core. But part of the reason it took so long though was because journalists couldn’t publish much of what they suspected.
Sports journalists rely – for better or worse – on access provided by FIFA to cover a lot of international football news. They simply cannot afford to get on the wrong side of them, or they risk themselves getting blacklisted. A football journalist barred from FIFA press briefings – or, say, the World Cup – is going to find it hard to keep their jobs.
The same is true – albeit to a lesser, and much more niche extent – with Eurovision.
Every year there are low-level scandals. National televoting discrepencies, juries getting leaned on, strange men with car boots filled with illicit international SIM cards. This is just part and parcel of putting 40 national delegations in competition with one another. Every team wants to get the edge on their neighbour. That’s natural.
But when the organisers themselves – the one nominally neutral part of the establishment – start to look shifty, then they’ve got a real problem.
It’s one thing cheating when you’ve got a dog in the fight. It’s quite another to cheat when you’re putting the fight on.
Jarmo Siim was, by all accounts, a delight to deal with. At the news of his resignation, the Eurovision fan community wrote heartfelt farewells to him. But if he had stayed on in the job, how exactly do you think he would have reacted to the journalist who dobbed him in when he applied for accreditation next year? Or the writers of Paron? Or Aftonbladet? Or any of the European media who also picked up on this story?
It’s slightly academic now as he’s not in charge of that any more. But guess who was sourcing Jarmo’s replacement? Wow!Works. So whoever’s stepping into Siim’s shoes is also going to be taking order from Bakker.
From here, the story can go one of two ways.
The first is that EBU life carries on as usual. The inner circle carries on getting their well-cushioned consultancy contracts, Stockholm is landed with the task of paying to make the two-week Eurovision party happen, and impoverished state broadcasters have to decide if it’s even worth them paying to take part in the contest.
The second is that the EBU makes a decision. They decide that, for all the work they’ve done on trying to make the competition more transparent in recent years, they still haven’t gone far enough. They need to start making it clearer to countries (especially in this time of wide-reaching European recession) what their money is being spent on.
Because it could be the case that this is all a set of suspicious-looking but unfortunate misunderstandings. Jarmo Siim really could have just hated that Måns Zelmerlöw song; Wow!Works’ fee might be entirely appropriate and justifiable; profits from the show may go straight back into making the rest of the European Broadcast Union’s output even stronger.
But without any transparency or accountability though, it is almost impossible to know.
Their most immediate problem though is the PR catastrophe that this is all spinning out to be. So let’s hope that the new PR bod drafted in to replace Jarmo Siim is worth the astronomical fee that we’ll be paying for them.
