Kia the fixer

Exclusive: 'I'm not an agent,' says the man at the middle of the Carlos Tevez affair
Kia Joorabchian
Kia Joorabchian denies any wrongdoing in the Carlos Tevez to West Ham affair. Photograph: Jason Cairnduff/Action Images

There is glee on Kia Joorabchian's face as he hurtles across his box on the halfway line at the Emirates Stadium to celebrate Robin van Persie's opening goal. 'Now, that is football,' Joorabchian informs one of his international guests as Arsenal ease ahead of Porto and set off on a Champions League cruise.

Joorabchian has supported Arsenal since his childhood years as an escapee from Iran's Islamic Revolution. As his business career meandered through market-floor oil trading, US-based hedge funds, UK car sales, London health centres and a Middle Eastern 'distress fund', he once explored the idea of buying into the club before deciding he could afford a £100,000-a-year corporate box, but not the whole shebang.

Instead, Joorabchian found another way into football. He became the lightning-rod front man of an otherwise secretive buy-in to Brazilian club Corinthians, which brought unprecedented transfer spending and a league title but ended in a federal police investigation, court actions, frozen bank accounts and relegation. Joorabchian has denied any wrongdoing throughout and an arrest warrant issued against him in Brazil has been suspended. He led an ultimately rejected takeover bid for West Ham. And he established himself as one of football's more important fixers - albeit taking a central role in one of the English game's great controversies en route.

When Javier Mascherano and Carlos Tevez left Corinthians for West Ham after performing well for Argentina at the 2006 World Cup finals, it was to general astonishment. Here were two of South America's most accomplished young footballers signing for a relatively minor club who had just finished ninth in their first season back in the Premier League.

If the deal appeared too good to be true, it was. Soon it emerged that West Ham had not purchased the Argentines, but borrowed them with no control over their next move. The sellers were not Corinthians, but four investment funds - Media Sports Investments (MSI), Just Sports Incorporated, Global Soccer Agencies (GSA) and Mystere Services Limited - represented by Joorabchian.

Worse still, West Ham broke the Premier League's rules by hiding the third-party ownership of the players' 'economic rights'. When the barely used Mascherano left for Liverpool the following January, the League was informed of the transgression, sparking a process of tribunal and litigation that is still unresolved. West Ham were told to tear up their contract with Tevez and his owners, yet, according to the independent tribunal, secretly promised to honour it. The tribunal fined them £5.5m for rule breaches in April 2007, but did not deduct points from the relegation-threatened club. Sheffield United went down and, like Joorabchian, took High Court action against West Ham for breach of contract. As the legal arguments unfolded, West Ham agreed to an independent arbitration process, which last month decreed that a points penalty should have been imposed and the Blades were entitled to an as yet undecided sum of compensation. Throw in their legal fees, and a pair of South Americans who arrived for next to nothing may ultimately cost West Ham as much as £50m.

There are those associated with West Ham who say they will never forgive Joorabchian for the problems he has caused their club, despite the fact that the tribunal's findings were against the club and not against Joorabchian, who believes he did nothing wrong.

'The question is, why are we responsible for those deals?' he asks. 'Why are we responsible for what happened to West Ham? And no one can answer that, because what we did was perfectly within the regulations of the Premier League. We brought in two loan players, we made a contract with West Ham United to loan them out. If West Ham do not register that contract with the Premier League it is out of our hands. I am not responsible to register the contract with West Ham with the Premier League, I am not responsible to register the contract of Carlos at Man United with the Premier League. That's to do with the club and the people inside it. We're making a deal. I made sure that on my side the contract - the release of the player, the registration - everything is legal. They have to make sure on the football side everything is legal.

'Believe me, if we had done anything wrong we also would have been under the lawsuit, under scrutiny. But clearly since we have never been sued, never been accused of any wrongdoing, everyone has granted that we hadn't done anything wrong. And, quite contrary, everyone knows that third-party ownership was permitted because Liverpool and Man United both managed to do it after [the West Ham deal].'

On that he is half right. Though the Premier League permitted Mascherano and Tevez to move north on loan deals that left their economic rights in the hands of the funds Joorabchian manages, the League ensured their contracts specified fixed periods in which the players could not be sold and at the end of which Liverpool and United had first option to buy at a predetermined price.

While League officials say that West Ham would have been allowed to structure their Mascherano and Tevez loans in such fashion had they declared Joorabchian's involvement from the off, they have since introduced rules that outlaw transfers of that type. When, for example, Manchester City sought to sign Jô this summer they were required to buy the Brazilian striker 100 per cent. No loan deal, even of the Man United-Tevez formulation, was allowed.

The principle, say the Premier League, is 'to stop third-party ownership at these shores'. Their worry was having no regulatory control over the individuals or companies that owned such players; that they could do little to stop a third-party owner from instructing one of his goalkeepers to allow a forward from the same stable to score against him to increase the latter's market value.

Joorabchian's response to the new rule is interesting. He accepts that third-party ownership could be problematic in countries such as England where some clubs are owned by billionaires. 'I'm not saying there is a potential for bad behaviour, but there is a potential that someone can say it's unfair,' he says. 'They [the Premier League] said this system doesn't work in England - fair enough - so we stopped doing that.' But only in England. Joorabchian still manages a company, Sports Invest, that purchases the economic rights of talented footballers, loans them to clubs and waits for the player's market value to rise before selling on the rights for a profit.

'It is the South American model and a model that appears all over Europe,' he explains. 'We'll invest in a player and loan him to the club. Then if the club thinks that that player is amazing they can buy him from us. If the club wants to buy the player prior to us buying him, that's OK, too, but a lot of clubs don't want to take the risk. So we invest the money and let the club borrow the player. Of course the club pay only a loan fee but we get the upside if the player is successful. And if the player is unsuccessful we get the downside. We still have a business in South America and across Europe, and the business is very profitable.'

It is indeed commonplace in Europe and within the rules - at least two of the Porto side at Arsenal arrived in Portugal on transfers part-funded by GSA.

When the FA recently circulated a register of unlicensed agents, instructing clubs not to use the blacklisted individuals in transfer deals, questions were asked as to why Joorabchian's name did not appear on it. The FA explain that is because Joorabchian does not engage in agent activity - essentially that he does not formally sign off on transfer deals.

'I'm not a football agent and I don't practise as an agent. I think the agency business is very different,' Joorabchian says. 'We also have a business that advises players on their rights. We advise them on their image, on their financial stability, we advise them on every aspect, because a lot of agents are not professional to do that. A lot of agents work for us and basically they just do the player transfer. We provide the structure, and for that they work for us.'

His company also advises clubs on transfers and player contracts, puts them in contact with agents and even offers to scout for them. Joorabchian will not reveal the number of Premier League teams he works with, nor the agents he operates with, for fear of 'losing my competitive edge', but admits to dealing on an informal basis with Manchester City and to having one formal consultancy agreement - with West Ham United.

'We provide them with a manner of how to get a player,' Joorabchian says. 'If they don't know which agent to contact to get X player, we will resource that for them, connect the agent to them. If they want information on players in South America we can provide it. We have a full scouting service, we provide them with a structure. We are another arm of the football director. We've been involved in advising them on what offers to accept and what not. And we've been paid according to how we've agreed with them, but I can't disclose how we've been paid. It's all within the context of our consultancy agreement.'

If the concept of West Ham's new owners employing a man so central to their current travails as an adviser appears bizarre, it may be because it was agreed as an out-of-court settlement to Joorabchian's High Court action against the club for tearing up the contract agreed over Tevez and then charging him to move the player to Manchester United. 'We'd given them a free loan and they wanted to charge us £2m, which was unfair,' Joorabchian says. 'So we processed and settled to get our money back. Not to gain any money, but to get our money back.'

Whose money, exactly, Joorabchian will not say. The exiled Russian billionaire Boris Berezovsky is one businessman whose name has been linked to MSI, though he denies any involvement. Players' agent Pini Zahavi has admitted to advising GSA but denied being an investor. The structure of Joorabchian's company is designed to keep investors' identities concealed. So restrictive are his confidentiality agreements, Joorabchian cannot even say if he is an investor himself.

'I can't reveal any shareholder,' he says. 'It's under my obligation. What I can tell you is that I manage the investment group, I don't work with MSI, I have no connection with MSI, I resigned from that in 2006, so that's that. But I manage the investment group and obviously when the investment group is profitable, as fund manager, you also get a cut.'

From his plush seats at Arsenal that cut appears to be a good one. The Premier League do not like him, but Kia Joorabchian has no intention of exiting football any time soon.

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