A football agent accused of corruption claimed Sir Alex Ferguson conspired to fix a match between Manchester United and Juventus and was gifted for a £30,000 Rolex watch, a court heard today.
Giuseppe ‘Pino’ Pagliara is one of two football agents on trial alongside former Barnsley assistant coach Tommy Wright. All three deny bribery.
A jury at Southwark Crown Court was told the trio were charged following a series of stings by the Daily Telegraph, one of which led to Sam Allardyce resigning as England manager.
As part of the prosecution case outlined today, the court was told of unsubstantiated claims Pagliara made about former Premier League managers during the agent’s meeting with an undercover reporter, who was posing as a businesswoman.
Prosecutor Brian O’Neill QC said that, at one meeting, Pagliara launched into a ‘diatribe’ about former Manchester United manager Sir Alex Ferguson, accusing him of allegedly conspiring to fix the result of a Champions League match against Italian side Juventus.
Pagliara claimed he had ‘thanked’ Ferguson with ‘a gold, thirty grand Rolex watch’.
Price and Pagliara boasted about their links in Belgium, Italy and England and made allegations about the behaviour of other prominent footballing figures such as Steve McLaren, Harry Redknapp and manager Neil Warnock, among others.
Pagliara also claimed that ’99 per cent of the people in football if they weren’t in football would be selling second-hand cars’.
He claimed he had ‘opened so many Swiss bank accounts for managers that you would not believe’, the prosecutor said.
Mr O’Neill emphasised that none of these individuals were part of the prosecution’s case, which did not seek to ‘malign’ them as they were not present when the claims were said and not in a position to deny them in court.
He said the evidence was presented because it showed a defendant’s alleged ‘knowledge or belief of corruption within football in this country and elsewhere, and his willingness not just to condone such practices but also to embrace and exploit them.’
The court was also told that from their first meeting with the undercover journalist, Price and Pagliara ‘revealed their awareness of corrupt practices in the football transfer market and discussed their willingness to be involved in such activities’.
Mr O’Neill said the men repeatedly used the phrase ‘looking after people’ when discussing alleged corruption across the football world.
Pagliara is on trial alongside former Barnsley assistant coach Tommy Wright and fellow agent Dax Price at Southwark Crown Court.
An undercover reporter arranged for Wright, a former Leeds and Leicester player turned coach, to receive £5,000 in cash as the trio plotted the corrupt arrangement, the court heard.
Wright, 53, of Barnsley, South Yorkshire, denies two charges of accepting a bribe in contravention of the Bribery Act 2000.
Pagliara, 64, of Bury, Greater Manchester, and Price, 48, of Sittingbourne, Kent, both deny two counts of paying and facilitating a bribe under the same act.
The court heard that undercover journalist Claire Newell, using the pseudonym Claire Taylor, posed as a representative of a fake sports management company named Meiran, and contacted Pagliara in May 2016 pretending to want to invest in football players in the UK.
Prosecutor Mr O’Neill explained that, across a series of meetings, emails and texts, Pagliara, originally from Genoa in Italy, and Price, allegedly proposed schemes which saw them becoming players’ agents, buying them and placing them at clubs.
They would maintain ownership of a player, and profit from his onward sale, which Mr O’Neill said was ‘all to be facilitated by bribery’.
The court was told that such ‘third party ownership’ set-ups were banned by the English Football Association (FA) in 2009 and by Fifa, the football world-governing body, in 2015.
In August 2016, when all three defendants were present, Mr O’Neill said Wright received ‘an envelope containing £5,000 in cash’ in return for ‘commercial information about Barnsley FC’s players’.
The jury heard that Price and Pagliara, who has never been registered as a football agent with the FA, set up an introduction with Wright, who allegedly accepted payment to encourage players to appoint Price and Pagliara as their agents and help place players at Barnsley.
Mr O’Neill said Price and Pagliara ‘explicitly discussed the payment of future sums to Mr Wright’.
The court was told that from their first meeting with the undercover journalist, Price and Pagliara ‘revealed their awareness of corrupt practices in the football transfer market and discussed their willingness to be involved in such activities’.
Mr O’Neill said the men repeatedly used the phrase ‘looking after people’ when discussing alleged corruption across the football world.
He said Wright had helped arrange a meeting for the owner of Barnsley to be introduced to Price and Pagliara, where the Italian would pretend to be an interpreter, because he did not want it to be known that a previous finding of corruption had been made against him in Italy by the Italian Football Federation.
Mr O’Neill said Wright ‘rather than alerting his employers to this ruse, played along with the facade’.
The jury heard that at their first meeting with the undercover journalist, Price claimed football managers received ‘back-handers’ for player-signing deals.
He said: ‘It’s not corruption but you know it is corruption… because obviously at the end of the day they’re just putting every deal through the manager and they’re obviously copping the money for it.’
The jury were taken through transcripts of conversations with Pagliara and Price, secretly recorded during the Daily Telegraph’s investigation, which were later passed to the City of London Police.
The trial continues.
