Set to be without a club come June 30th when his Paris Saint-Germain contract runs out, Hatem Ben Arfa will be available on a free after not setting foot on a football pitch for over a year.
However, he could end up having a busy summer for very different reasons, as Le Parisien reveal he recently had to testify in court for an ongoing investigation by the “Central Office in the fight against Organised Crime” looking into his transfer from Marseille to Newcastle back in 2010.
The attacking midfielder spent a season on loan at St James’ Park before moving there permanently the following season, where he stayed until 2015 when his contract was terminated by the club in early January.
According to Le Parisien, the former Newcastle star’s case is part of a much wider inquest looking at ‘numerous transfers of Marseille players’ with the goal of discovering whether or not members of ’organised crime’ received money from the moves.
The key figure in all this is Jean-Luc Barresi, described as an ‘agent with a sulphurous reputation’, whose ‘name appears like a shadow behind Ben Arfa’s transfer to Newcastle’.
Le Parisien report that, through a 40 page statement, the investigators have managed to reconstruct the transfer’s ‘log book’, with intermediaries ‘appearing and disappearing’ all over the place.
They write: “Many times, the Marseille board stipulate in documents that they haven’t hired anyone for this transfer, while a man, Nathanael Busi, who presents himself as a ‘player collaborator’ did work for the club.
“He even boasted about it in a phone conversation heard by the police where he discusses the Ben Arfa transfer: ‘After, when I… when we got a bit of money and I didn’t want to give any to Barresi, it was war’.”
Le Parisien explain that “war” was his eviction from the negotiations and his €200k commission, at which point Marseille hired another agent, an Englishman named Simon Stainrod, who has already been mentioned as part of the big 2017 Newcastle ‘tax fraud probe’.
This is where it all gets fishy, as the French newspaper explain that to include Stainrod in the deal, many documents needed to be backdated, with fake contracts being drawn up.
According to the investigators, these fakes were just made to ‘allow the payment to third parties’, with the police believing Jean-Luc Barresi pressured the Marseille board to get rid of the first intermediary and use Stainrod, who was ‘most likely more inclined to share his profits’.
The police believe Barresi earned €50k from the deal.
Ben Arfa, his current advisor Michel Ouazine and his lawyer, Jean-Jacques Bertrand, were all heard as part of the investigation, but made it very clear they had nothing to do with what went on.
