Teneo Holdings, a corporate advisory firm co-founded by former Bill Clinton confidant Doug Band, signed on this week to offer strategic advice to FIFA, the BBC reported Thursday. The move comes as the international governing body of soccer is weaving its way through massive corruption investigations in the United States and Switzerland.
The report follows the July 9 announcement that Teneo had purchased Blue Rubicon, a London-based strategic communications firm that for years has worked closely with Qatar’s effort to host the 2022 World Cup, which has been plagued by allegations of human rights abuses and corruption.
Band, a close aide to Bill Clinton during his presidency and afterward, was the director of the United States’ 2022 World Cup bid that lost out to Qatar. He co-founded Teneo in 2011, shortly after he helped the former first family launch the Clinton Global Initiative, and he now serves as Teneo's president. Bill Clinton was once a paid adviser to the firm, but he stepped down in 2012. Band stepped away from his role at the Clinton Foundation in June, just before Hillary Clinton launched her 2016 presidential campaign, the New York Post reported.
Teneo has close ties to other American lawmakers and officials. The firm lists as a senior adviser former U.S. Sen. George Mitchell, who was appointed to an ambassadorial role by Bill Clinton and as Middle East envoy while Hillary Clinton served as secretary of state. Its team of executives and advisers includes former presidential advisers, top business officials and a former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Huma Abedin, one of Hillary Clinton’s closest advisers, also worked for the firm at the same time as she was working for the State Department as an adviser to Clinton. Band co-founded the firm with major Clinton fundraiser Declan Kelly, who was a top State Department official under Clinton.
The BBC reported that the ties to prominent lawmakers and aides were central to FIFA’s hiring of Teneo in the wake of a widespread corruption scandal that began with the arrest of seven top soccer officials in Zurich in late May. The U.S. Justice Department has indicted 14 officials on corruption charges, while the Swiss government continues to investigate corruption allegations around the 2018 and 2022 World Cups in Russia and Qatar, respectively. FIFA has maintained that it is cooperating with those investigations, and its president, Sepp Blatter, announced in June that he would step down to help kickstart broad reforms -- an effort Teneo, which lists corporate governance and responsibility and sports advisory among its areas of expertise, will likely assist.
A FIFA spokeswoman told the BBC that it hired Teneo to "to work across operational and reputational priorities."
Teneo declined a Huffington Post request for comment.
Blue Rubicon, which according to the acquisition announcement will remain under separate management from Teneo, has an office in Doha, Qatar, and lists the Qatari Supreme Development and Legacy Committee, the arm of the government responsible for the World Cup, as a client on its web site. The site says the firm has at least two employees in Doha to work full-time with the committee.
Qatar has been the subject of corruption allegations since FIFA awarded it the World Cup in 2010, and its labor system, which human rights and labor organizations have likened to “modern day slavery,” has also drawn international scrutiny. The International Trade Union Confederation, a global labor organization, estimated that as many as 4,000 workers -- most of them migrants from other countries -- could die on World Cup-related construction projects before the event begins. The Guardian reported that Nepalese migrant workers in Qatar died at a rate of one every two days in 2014.
Though committees within the Qatari government have proposed labor reforms, international groups have said it has failed to implement them, and World Cup sponsors have begun to acknowledge the issue.
Those reports underscored the “reputational damage” Qatar had suffered as part of the World Cup process and the reason it brought Blue Rubicon in to help, one Middle East-focused write-up of the relationship said. Blue Rubicon’s work is specifically aimed at the World Cup bid, while another firm handles the nation’s overall reputation, according to industry publications.
Both FIFA and the Qatari Supreme Legacy and Development Committee have donated to the Clinton Foundation. FIFA gave between $50,00o and $100,000, according to the foundation’s documents, while the Qatari committee donated between $250,000 and $500,000.