The New York Times International - 29.07.2019

T HE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION MONDAY, JULY 29, 2019 | 13

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GARFIELD

KENKEN

Answers to Previous Puzzles

WIZARD of ID

DOONESBURY CLASSIC 1993

CALVIN AND HOBBES

DILBERT

Created by Peter Ritmeester/Presented by Will Shortz

SUDOKU No. 2907

Fill the grid so

that every row,

column 3x3 box

and shaded 3x

box contains

each of the

numbers

1 to 9 exactly

once.

Fill the grids with digits so as not

to repeat a digit in any row or

column, and so that the digits

within each heavily outlined box

will produce the target number

shown, by using addition,

subtraction, multiplication or

division, as indicated in the box.

A 4x4 grid will use the digits

1-4. A 6x6 grid will use 1-6.

For solving tips and more KenKen

puzzles: http://www.nytimes.com/

kenken. For Feedback: nytimes@

kenken.com

For solving tips

and more puzzles:

http://www.nytimes.com/

sudoku

KenKen® is a registered trademark of Nextoy, LLC.

Copyright © 2018 http://www.KENKEN.com. All rights reserved.

(c) PZZL.com Distributed by The New York Times syndicate

Solution No. 2707 CROSSWORD | Edited by Will Shortz

Across

1 Major uncertainty

6 Canvas for a tattoo

10 Mae who said “I used

to be Snow White, but

I drifted”

14 “You ___ Beautiful”

(Joe Cocker hit)

15 Mexican entree in a

shell

16 Large fair, informally

17 Athlete with a mitt

19 Bridle strap

20 Poker stake

21 Bill Clinton’s was in

the 1990s

22 ___ Haute, Ind.

23 One going for a stroll

among urban greenery

26 “Quit wasting time!”

30 Abba of Israel

31 Even a little

32 ___-haw

33 Plumbing woe

37 Official hearing a case

41 Fish that wriggle

42 What’s dropped off a

cigarette

43 Words of empathy

44 Weights that may be

“short” or “long”

46 Tevye’s occupation in

“Fiddler on the Roof”

48 Herbie Hancock or

Chick Corea

52 “Later, amigo!”

53 Employ

54 Bleats

58 William with a state

named after him

59 Place where 17-, 23-,

37- and 48-Across

might be found

62 Sheltered from the

wind

63 Parks in civil rights

history

64 Language family of

Africa

65 Loch ___ monster

66 “That’s enough!”

67 Adventurous journey

Down

1 “Ali ___ and the 40

Thieves”

2 Land with an ayatollah

3 Hanukkah “moolah”

4 ___ of Capri

5 Dandyish dresser

6 Van Gogh’s “The ___

Night”

7 Boat you might shoot

rapids in

8 What a “neat” drink

doesn’t come with

9 Word paired with

“neither”

10 “How fortunate for

us!”

11 Apply, as force

12 Former vice president

Agnew

13 Printer cartridge

contents

18 Meadows

22 Airport screening org.

23 Tug on

24 Turn sharply

25 Skeptic’s sarcastic

comment

26 Racehorse’s starting

point

27 Raison d’___

28 Pin the ___ on the

donkey

29 Bomb testing areas

32 “Come again?”

34 Semihard Dutch

cheese

35 City that’s home to

the Taj Mahal

36 Sharp-witted

38 “Is it O.K., mom?”

39 Peak near Olympus

40 Leave at the altar

45 Special ___ (military

missions)

46 Event that’s an

“Oops!”

47 “Ah, makes sense”

48 Where Honda

and Mazda are

headquartered

49 Grammy-winning

singer of “Hello”

50 Fan publications,

informally

51 Bonkers

54 Lover boy

55 Youngest of the

Brontë sisters

56 Things passed in

Congress

57 “___ your piehole!”

59 Surgery sites, for

short

60 Word after waste and

want

61 Cookout, briefly

PUZZLE BY BRUCE HAIGHT

Solution to Jul 27 Puzzle

BOING HEADER

ENCORECURSIVE

TEEBOXRELIEVES

TIDEWATERACCENT

ADULTMALESROO

SAPPHIRESBBGUN

RANATFILET

HIRESJANUS

RAZEDBARGE

MEDEACRIMEBOSS

AMFTEENPEOPLE

LOANTRANSLATION

AVIARISTOTTAWA

LETTUCEWELTER

ASHLEE REEDY

12345678910111213

14 15 16

17 18 19

20 21 22

23 2425

26272829 30

31 32 33343536

37 3839 40

41 42 43

4445 4647

484950 51

52 53 54555657

58 5960 61

62 63 64

65 66 67

sports

To the judge, the math at Paris St.-Ger-

main simply did not add up.

In one free-spending summer in 2017,

P.S.G. made the two most expensive ac-

quisitions in soccer history, paying more

than $400 million to add the star for-

wards Neymar and Kylian Mbappé to

the French champions’ star-studded

roster.

To outsiders, the signings — without

offsetting sales of similar value or a

huge infusion of sponsorship revenue —

simply could not square with European

soccer’s so-called financial fair-play sys-

tem. Those rules, created to reduce

clubs’ indebtedness and level the play-

ing field in an era in which teams were

being infused with cash by billionaires

and nation-states, require clubs to bal-

ance their spending with revenue.

An investigation of P.S.G. was begun.

A report was produced. When it arrived

last June on the desk of José Narciso da

Cunha Rodrigues, a former judge at Eu-

rope’s top court and the chairman of the

UEFA panel that penalizes teams that

break the organization’s financial rules,

he discovered that the lead investigator

had cleared P.S.G.

So after a member of his panel went

through the report, Cunha Rodrigues

sent the file back, demanding that the in-

vestigator, Yves Leterme, a former Bel-

gian prime minister, reassess the case.

In doing so, he also raised questions

about several of Leterme’s conclusions.

“The decision to close the case,”

Cunha Rodrigues wrote, “was mani-

festly erroneous.”

The details of UEFA’s nearly yearlong

investigation of P.S.G., and the fight over

its conclusions, are included in docu-

ments obtained by The New York Times

that repeatedly eviscerate the decision

by UEFA investigators to exonerate the

Qatari-financed club, one of the biggest

spenders in sports. But the documents

also reveal how UEFA appeared to sink

its own investigation, and how P.S.G.

used a technicality to avoid the possibil-

ity of serious punishment and preserve

its cherished place in soccer’s richest

competition, the Champions League.

P.S.G.’s victory also has implications

for a current case — the Premier League

champion Manchester City, whose rise

has been financed by the brother of the

ruler of Abu Dhabi, faces a similar inves-

tigation over suspected financial vio-

lations — and even for the future of fi-

nancial fair play itself, and UEFA’s abil-

ity, and willingness, to enforce its rules.

“There are clubs who could not care

less what their real incomes are when

they want to sign a player, because they

receive incomes from a state,” Javier

Tebas, the head of the Spanish league,

said in May. “It forces other clubs into an

economic situation that is really living

on the edge. It skews the balance of the

entire European soccer structure.”

P.S.G.’s defense in the 2017 case lay in

its accounting, and its argument that

rich sponsorship deals with Qatari enti-

ties like the telecom company Ooredoo,

the Qatar National Bank and, most cru-

cially, the Qatar Tourism Authority had

made the purchases of Neymar and

Mbappé — and other world-class play-

ers — possible.

But Cunha Rodrigues rejected the cal-

culations presented by Leterme in his

report, which favored the French club

and allowed it to fall just within a ratio of

UEFA’s accepted losses.

It would be, Cunha Rodrigues wrote,

“adverse to the interests of clubs com-

peting in UEFA competitions for one

club to maintain a substantial financial

advantage from an erroneous applica-

tion of the regulations by the chief inves-

tigator.”

But there would be no further investi-

gation, and no re-analysis of Leterme’s

decision. P.S.G. appealed the decision by

Cunha Rodrigues’s adjudicatory cham-

ber to send back the file, taking its case

to the Court of Arbitration for Sport.

There, it argued that there had been a

procedural error that required Le-

terme’s decision to stand. UEFA sided

with P.S.G., agreeing with the French

club’s interpretation of the rules. Its fail-

ure to back Cunha Rodrigues’s commit-

tee meant the case was closed.

In a statement, UEFA said it had “full

trust in the work” carried out by Le-

terme and Cunha Rodrigues, pointing

out that the committees they oversee

are run independently.

“It is therefore possible that the views

of the members of one chamber are not

always the same of those of the other

chamber,” it said.

The details surrounding the decision

to clear P.S.G. in 2018 have been

shrouded in secrecy, but the documents

reviewed by The Times suggest that, at

the very least, the French champion had

a narrow escape. But the outcome of the

case is likely to lead to further scrutiny

of the close relationship between the

team’s Qatari owners and UEFA.

P.S.G.’s president, Nasser al-Khelaifi,

sits on UEFA’s executive committee and

is also the chairman of beIN Media

Group, the Qatar-based broadcaster

that has committed billions to secure

television rights from UEFA and other

partners.

P.S.G. had been mired in mediocrity

until it was purchased by Qatar’s sover-

eign investment fund, Qatar Sports In-

vestments, in 2011. Having secured

hosting rights to the 2022 World Cup a

year earlier, the tiny Gulf state was ea-

ger to create a superclub that could chal-

lenge established soccer royalty like

Real Madrid, Bayern Munich and Man-

chester United. It immediately went on

a spending spree to construct a team,

and an organization, capable of over-

whelming domestic rivals and challeng-

ing for Europe’s biggest trophies. By

2017, it seemed to conclude that Neymar

and Mbappé might put it over the top.

Those high-end, head-spinning pur-

chases came against a backdrop of UE-

FA’s financial regulations, which had

taken full effect a few years earlier. How,

critics and rivals asked, could P.S.G. ex-

ceed the world transfer record not once,

but twice, and stay within the rules?

The solution the club reached — as did

Manchester City, which was accumulat-

ing high-end players in a similar spend-

ing spree — was to sign a slew of spon-

sorship deals and associations with en-

terprises linked to its owners. One in

particular stood out: a huge agreement

with the Qatar Tourism Authority for a

nebulous concept known as “nation

branding” that was booked as P.S.G.’s

highest sponsorship deal, more than 100

million euros, or $111 million, per season.

It was those sponsorship deals that

came under the microscope when P.S.G.,

already penalized for a financial breach

in 2015, came under investigation again

only a month after the Neymar and

Mbappé transfers. Under financial fair-

play rules, clubs are limited to losses of

no more than €30 million over a three-

year period.

To assess the value of P.S.G.’s sponsor-

ships, Leterme, the UEFA financial in-

vestigator, commissioned the sports

marketing company Octagon World-

wide to analyze the agreements. He also

told P.S.G. it could hire a different firm to

conduct its own analysis.

The Octagon version returned a ver-

dict that valued the Qatar tourism

agreement, a sponsorship that had

hardly any visibility, at less than €5 mil-

lion; P.S.G. said its analysis, conducted

for the club by Nielsen, came back with a

figure close to the amount claimed by

P.S.G. Rather than request a third study,

Leterme determined, to the consterna-

tion of members of his investigative

committee, that the Nielsen figures

should be used.

While some members of his panel ve-

hemently disagreed with his decision to

clear P.S.G. — one person familiar with

the committee’s work labeled his conclu-

sions “absurd reasonings” — Leterme’s

decision was nonetheless announced on

June 18, when the world’s soccer media

was focused on the 2018 World Cup that

had kicked off four days earlier.

By Leterme’s calculations, P.S.G. had,

despite its record spending and with the

help of its disputed sponsorships, in-

curred a loss of only €24 million over the

three-year period — just within the

mark that would have caused a referral

for penalties to Cunha Rodrigues’s adju-

dicatory chamber.

“Contrary to the assertion by the

chief investigator, this treatment of the

fair value of the QTA agreement in re-

porting period 2017 was indeed of great

advantage to the club,” Cunha Ro-

drigues wrote. He also pointed to other

agreements that also appeared to be

overvalued, to P.S.G.’s benefit, in Le-

terme’s final report.

This and a number of other findings

led him to the conclusion that the deci-

sion to clear P.S.G. should be “vitiated,”

or scrapped, and that a new investiga-

tion should be undertaken immediately.

But before that could happen, P.S.G.

announced that it was mounting an ap-

peal, saying that there were no grounds

for Cunha Rodrigues to scrap Leterme’s

decision, and that he had missed a 10-

day deadline to conduct a review. Cunha

Rodrigues described that as a “logical

absurdity,” given the amount of work

needed to assess the documents and val-

uations in a financial fair-play case. The

10-day limit, he said, referred to starting

a review, not concluding it.

Galatasaray, a Turkish team that had

reached a settlement with Leterme that

Cunha Rodrigues also wanted re-evalu-

ated, filed a similar appeal to the Court

of Arbitration for Sport a week later.

P.S.G. and UEFA agreed to wait for the

result in the Galatasaray hearing before

resuming the case.

But UEFA, to the horror of Cunha Ro-

drigues and other adjudicatory cham-

ber officials, sided with Galatasaray’s

interpretation of the 10-day limit, and

didn’t even mount a defense. A few

weeks later, it did the same in the P.S.G.

case, and on March 19, in a short news

release, it announced Leterme’s deci-

sion would stand.

“Following a legal assessment made,

with support of external legal counsel,

concerning the interpretation of the

above-mentioned article, UEFA con-

cluded that indeed there were strong ar-

guments supporting the interpretation

presented by the club,” UEFA said in its

statement to The Times.

There are no longer active investiga-

tions into P.S.G. And Neymar and

Mbappé still form one of the most potent

attacking forces on the planet.

Manchester City’s case is up next: Cu-

nha Rodrigues is scheduled to deliver a

verdict later this year.

In P.S.G. case, UEFA surrendered without a fight

BY TARIQ PANJA

Nasser al-Khelaifi, Paris St.-Germain’s president, is on the board of UEFA, whose financial rules the club was accused of violating.

GONZALO FUENTES/REUTERS

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