The Socialist 13 April 2016

Panama papers, steel crisis, junior doctors' contract, austerity...Tories out!

Panama Papers reveal corrupt system of the 1%

Austerity not needed

Reactionary EU campaigners implicated by Panama Papers

Another Fifa corruption scandal

Houses for offshore investment, we're stuck at home

Nationalise to save all Steel jobs

Save BIS Sheffield: we won't be a Northern Poorhouse!

RMT branch calls for TUSC backing to continue

Doctors fight on against imposed contracts

Construction workers defend jobs and pay

Workplace news in brief

Review: 'Militant' by Michael Crick

Solidarity with refugees: fight for jobs, homes and services for all

Campaigning for scholarships for refugees - and free education for all

France: full-scale struggle with government is erupting

Bangladesh: stop the Rampal power project

Brazil: solidarity with attacked civil servants

International Panama Papers protests

Bosses back EU to boost NHS sell-offs

Library occupation ends with march on cutting council

Sales of the Socialist on the rise, read all about it!

No A-level courses in Knowsley thanks to 'academies' system

Workers and youth unite to defend vital services

"Not the church, not the state - women must decide their fate!"

Huddersfield A&E fightback grows

Demonstration to defend the NHS in Leicester

Worcestershire: hands off our health service!

Letter: Women and work

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Another Fifa corruption scandal

Photo Katie Brady (Creative Commons) (Click to enlarge)

Suzanne Beishon

The last Fifa corruption revelations were hardly out of the headlines when a new scandal has struck the damaged organisation - this time from the Panama Papers.

Last summer, swamped in scandal, it looked impossible for the international football governing body to find a way to clean up its obliterated reputation. Up stepped Michel Platini (president of European football organisation Uefa).

Yet immediately his credentials started to crumble. It was discovered that Sepp Blatter, former Fifa president who was at the centre of the original corruption scandal, had paid Platini two million Swiss francs, allegedly for work carried out nine years previous.

The global public backlash this provoked forced a seemingly blind Fifa ethics committee into action. His resultant ban from football for six years left a hole again.

Next in line to fill the void was Uefa general secretary Gianni Infantino - a Swiss lawyer and career sports administrator whose dirt was harder to dig up. His honeymoon hasn't lasted long either.

The leak of the colossal Panama Papers has caught the global elite with their trousers down. The scale of their dodgy dealings, money laundering, tax evasion and more has been exposed in dramatic fashion.

And, unsurprisingly, the papers showed Infantino to have been involved in dodgy offshore World Cup deals alongside now indicted Fifa members during his time as director of legal services at Uefa.

Reflection

As we've said previously in this paper, football doesn't exist in a bubble. The processes and bodies in the footballing world reflect the machinations of wider society.

As football has become a global profitable marketplace, the Fifa crooks have absorbed the attitude, greed and methods of the corrupt rich leaders in world economics and politics.

Fifa reform is impossible under its own auspices. They have proved incapable of mapping out a genuine grassroots-based agenda for change. And that is because it's not in their interest.

Like capitalism and the barbaric austerity-driven regimes across the globe it creates, Fifa needs tearing down and transforming from the bottom up to truly be a body worthy of representing and championing the people's game.

In this issue

Panama Papers

Panama Papers reveal corrupt system of the 1%