A journalist with many friends in the Eden area who established an international reputation for exposing corruption at the highest levels of world sport has died at the age of 78.
Andrew Jennings wrote many of his articles about greed and wrongdoing at the top of organisations including FIFA — football’s world governing body — while sitting at a desk which gave him a panoramic view of the North Pennines.
Himself a former local newspaper journalist and with a strong belief in the value of accuracy and careful evidence gathering, he was a keen reader of the Herald, which he regarded as a “proper local paper”.
Born in Kirkcaldy, Fife, Andrew moved to London with his family at a young age and attended Watford Technical High School before studying social administration at the University of Hull. It was while there that he investigated the deaths at sea of 58 local fishermen in 1968 and sold the information to the national press, setting him on the road to a career in journalism.
He initially got a job with the Burnley Evening Star and progressed to become a specialist in reporting on drug smuggling and international crime. He wrote a book on this subject, Scotland Yard’s Cocaine Connection, and a documentary based on this was broadcast on ITV’s World In Action programme.
It was after this that he started investigating the International Olympic Committee and he quickly started to uncover the corruption and mismanagement at the heart of this hallowed body.
He wrote three books on the subject, the first, published in 1992, being The Lords of the Rings: Power, Money and Drugs in the Modern Olympics, co-authored with Vyv Simson.
As a result, he was given a five-day suspended jail sentence in the court of Canton de Vaud in Lausanne, Switzerland, for defamation of the IOC, and also banned from IOC events.
Undeterred, he made more allegations in his 1996 book The New Lords of the Rings and then scrutinised the IOC’s reform programme in The Great Olympic Swindle, co-authored with his partner Clare Sambrook and published in 2000. His investigations and resulting revelations led to the resignation of IOC president Juan Antonio Samaranch in 2001 and the expulsion of IOC members during the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City in 2002.
Andrew suspected that many of the IOC’s failings were also endemic within FIFA and showed this was indeed the case after moving to the Penrith area with Clare and their son Henry in 2001.
It was in 2002 at a press event in Zurich that he asked FIFA president Sepp Blatter if he had ever taken a bribe — which Blatter denied having done.
However, this seemingly simple question set in train a series of clandestine meetings and revelations which eventually saw the publication in 2006 of another book by Andrew, Foul! The Secret World of Fifa: Bribes, Vote Rigging and Ticket Scandals.
The highly damaging allegations made in this volume were repeated in the same year on the BBC’s Panorama programme and this was again the platform in 2010 for further allegations against FIFA by Andrew.
He outlined yet more allegations on the eve of the award of the 2018 World Cup to Russia, following which England’s bid for the tournament attracted just two votes.
Meanwhile, crime agencies around the world had initially shown no interest in investigating the FIFA allegations — but the FBI and US tax authorities eventually did so, with the Swiss subsequently also taking action.
These inquiries resulted in a number of arrests and prosecutions. In the summer of 2015 Blatter resigned from his position as FIFA president.
Throughout Andrew’s lengthy investigations into FIFA, he regarded Eden as being a place of rest and recuperation before he headed out on to the international road once more.
He suffered a stroke in 2015 and went into semi-retirement with his family near Penrith.
Clare survives him, along with their children Henry and Rosie. He also had a daughter by his first marriage, Sophie, who lives in the USA.
