Stewart Reuben wrote: ↑Wed Sep 12, 2018 12:18 pm
Sunday Times of 9 September. Headline
Putin sends knight to take control of world chess federation - with help of British Grandmaster. Aditional reporting by Jack Hunter
...
At stake is the presidency of an organisation about which the Russian state cares desperately and no oher government does -
Short said FIDE was worse than FIFA. 'There is an astonishing amount of cronyism'
Good spot, Stewart. I missed this online. FULL TEXT follows, not that it says anything that hasn't been better dealt with here
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Putin sends knight to take control of world chess federation — with help of British grandmaster Nigel Short
James Gillespie, September 9 2018, Sunday Times
The novichok has not been used yet, but it cannot be far off. Another battle involving the highest realms of the Kremlin against the rest of the world is under way — but this time an Englishman is joining forces with Moscow. At stake is the presidency of an organisation about which the Russian state cares desperately and no other government does: the ruling body of world chess, known as Fide (Fédération Internationale des Échecs).
The election will take place next month to replace Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, 56, the Russian multimillionaire who has ruled the game since 1995. He is not standing again after being sanctioned by the US Treasury amid claims of links to the Syrian government. But his fellow Russian Arkady Dvorkovich is on the ballot, as are Georgios Makropoulos, a Greek who was Ilyumzhinov’s deputy, and the British grandmaster Nigel Short.
While it may seem a rather arcane body, Fide has 189 member federations, making it one of the largest sports organisations in the world. And the infighting is as vicious and ruthless as in any other sporting body. Short said Fide was “worse than Fifa”, the governing body of world football. “There is an astonishing amount of cronyism,” he said. But Short now appears to have made common cause with Dvorkovich, a former Russian deputy prime minister. The British candidate has tweeted a picture of himself shaking hands with Dvorkovich and saying they are “united in our determination to bring transparency and the rule of law and to root out cronyism and corruption”.
Vladimir Putin is understood to have lobbied the Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, to persuade his chess federation to vote for the Russian.
Short and Dvorkovich are pitted against Makropoulos, whom they see as the old guard. He was, said Short, “a big part of the problem”. However, Makropoulos also has a British running mate in Malcolm Pein, one of the leading figures in British chess. “We are going to win,” Pein said. He did not mince his words, pointing out that Dvorkovich was deputy prime minister at the time of the Skripal poisoning in Salisbury. “You should not underestimate how important chess is to the Russian state,” he said. “We are determined to clean Fide up. Nigel does not have a monopoly on virtue, particularly when he has just allied himself with a high ranking official of the world’s biggest kleptocracy.”
Each country’s chess federation has one vote, so the British Virgin Islands (population 30,000) has the same weight as Russia (population 144m).
Dvorkovich has at least one other claim to fame: he was in charge of organising the 2018 World Cup — for Fifa.