FIFA announces $369 million loss with worse to come

Yahoo – AFP, Ben Simon, Apr 7, 2017

FIFA on Friday announced a record $369 million loss for 2016 (AFP
Photo/FABRICE COFFRINI)

Zurich (AFP) - FIFA on Friday announced a $369 million loss for 2016, a second straight annual deficit, as it recovers from bribery scandals and acknowledged it had spent a huge chunk of its reserves in the past year.

The game's world governing body blamed the cost of investigating the scandals, bad investments and accounting changes. But there is worse to come for the organisation, which is rebuilding after its near collapse at the end of the tainted Sepp Blatter era.

It expects to lose $489 million, before tax, in 2017 before a World Cup revenue bonanza in 2018 rescues the accounts.

FIFA's losses for 2015-2017 are set to hit $910 million (855 million euros) even though it revised its 2015 deficit down from $122 million to $52 million.

Revenues fell to $502 million in 2016 from $544 million in 2015.

FIFA said its reserves had fallen from $1.4 billion in 2015 to $1.04 billion in 2016 and they are expected to crash to $605 million this year.

FIFA is banking on making $1.1 billion in profits in 2018 when the World Cup is held in Russia, which would give a surplus of about $100 million for the organisation's four-year accounting cycle.

The organisation said the bumper profits, mainly from television deals, would help bring its reserves back to $1.7 billion in 2018.

Since a police raid on a FIFA congress hotel in May 2015 when seven football officials were arrested, Blatter and his two top deputies, secretary general Jerome Valcke and finance officer Markus Kattner, have been suspended or fired.

The three awarded themselves huge bonuses and pay rises during their final years in power and all face criminal investigation.

New FIFA president Gianni Infantino took over promising reform but also higher payments to the 200-plus national federations that are now costing FIFA dearly.

Hailing his moves toward greater transparency, Infantino said: "The gravity of the crisis that assailed FIFA in recent years called for equally radical measures. Our response was to express our unshakeable commitment to drawing a line under the events that had so tarnished the image and reputation of the organisation."

Infantino's annual salary was stated in the accounts at $1.5 million, less than half that of Blatter.

FIFA said the main cause of the 2016 loss was new accounting rules. Before they booked profits when contracts were signed, now they can only be counted when the contract, such as the World Cup, is completed.

Accounting experts said, however, this change would only account for about $35 million of the 2016 loss.

FIFA also spent $50 million on investigating the lingering scandals.

Museum loss

US authorities have charged about 40 individuals and companies over more than $200 million in bribes paid for television and other commercial deals. Many of the defendants, who are to go on trial in New York in November, are former FIFA executive members.

But the organisation also admitted that it lost $50 million on the FIFA museum that was a pet Blatter project.

FIFA spent 140 million Swiss francs (130 million euros/$138 million) on the three-floor museum in Zurich which has become a huge white elephant.

Since opening last year, it has attracted an average of 11,000 visitors a month, barely half the target.

The organisation also suffered a multi-million dollar loss on its investment in the Ascot Hotel in Zurich which is near the museum.

Amid the scandal fallout, Infantino has had to find ways to fund his promise to triple payments to national federations from $1.6 million every four years to up to $5 million.

Despite the red ink headlines, FIFA's leadership says the organisation is not in trouble.

The organisation predicts revenue of $5.65 billion for the four-year cycle ending with the 2018 World Cup. It said there are contracts for 76 percent of this figure.

Dutch, French to jointly buy rare Rembrandts for 160 mn euros

Yahoo – AFP, Jan Hennop, 30 Sep 2015

The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam houses a large collection of Dutch art through

the centuries, including many Rembrandts (AFP Photo/Robin van Lonkhuijsen)

The Hague (AFP) - The Netherlands and France will jointly buy two rare Rembrandts for 160 million euros, the Dutch culture minister said Wednesday after the two states defused a potential bidding war.

The 17th-century paintings, which currently belong to the wealthy French Rothschild banking family and have rarely been seen in public, will alternate between the Rijksmuseum and the Louvre, Jet Bussemaker said in a letter to the Dutch parliament.

"We believe these two rare portraits should always be allowed to be admired together, alternately between the Rijksmuseum and the Louvre, so they are accessible to the broader public, both young and old," she said, adding that the deal was cemented by Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte and French President Francois Hollande at the United Nations this week.

"A few months ago it still seemed unthinkable," Rijksmuseum director Wim Pijbes told Dutch radio. "But now two beautiful portraits will be together in the public domain, in two museums of world fame."

Wrangling over the two full-length portraits of a young couple painted by the Dutch master around their wedding in 1634 had threatened to sour relations between the two European allies.

Visitors looks at Rembrandt's "The Night Watch" in the Rijksmuseum in

Amsterdam, on May 17, 2015 (AFP Photo/Robin van Lonkhuijsen)

Bussemaker on Friday said the Dutch government was willing to stump up half the 160 million euro ($180 million) price tag, with the remaining 80 million euros to be found by the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.

But her French counterpart Fleur Pellerin had said the day before that Paris had submitted an offer to acquire one of the portraits for the Louvre, and that the paintings would alternate between the two museums.

After "intensive" discussions with Paris over the last few days, the Dutch cabinet decided to agree with France to share the costs "given our combined interests", Bussemaker said.

Details of the agreement -- including insurance and responsibility for restoration -- still need to be worked out, Bussemaker said.

Rarely displayed

The affluent Amsterdam couple Maerten Soolmans and Oopjen Coppit commissioned Rembrandt to paint the highly detailed separate portraits on the occasion of their wedding, and the two paintings have always been treated as a single unit, media reports said.

Dressed fashionably in black, Soolmans is depicted holding a glove in his left hand, while Coppit holds an ostrich feather fan and wears a four-row pearl necklace as well as other fine jewellery.

The artnet website said the canvases have been viewed publicly only once in the past 150 years, and Bussemaker has already stressed the importance of finally putting them on public display.

According to the Dutch daily paper NRC, the paintings were reportedly sold to the Rothschilds in 1877 for 1.5 million guilders, despite attempts by the Dutch government at the time to keep them in The Netherlands.

The 17th-century Rembrandt paintings bought jointly by the Netherlands and France

 will alternate between the Louvre in Paris (pictured) and the Rijksmuseum in 

Amsterdam (AFP Photo/Miguel Medina)

The Rothschild family first indicated it wanted to sell the paintings in 2013, NRC added.

'Pair of shoes'

The Rijksmuseum's Pijbes said it was a new concept "in the museum world for two countries to work together to obtain works from a private collection."

He said each country would own half of each of the two paintings, which were "like a pair of shoes, never to be separated".

French Minister Pellerin and Bussemaker in a separate statement issued in Paris also welcomed the deal.

The solution "meets the common cultural and political objective" the countries set for themselves, namely "to keep the paintings on European soil and show them to a large audience."

Louvre president Jean-Luc Martinez called the agreement an "innovative solution" with a "happy outcome that will allow the two masterpieces be seen in public in two major European museums."

Related Article:

Netherlands and France to share Rembrandt wedding portraits

Italy taps foreigners to run top museums

Italy has announced the appointment of seven foreigners to head national museums as part of a move to revive cultural attractions. New hires are to be tasked with instituting reforms sought by the Culture Ministry.

Deutsche Welle, 19 Aug 2015

Italian museums that house masterpieces such as Michelangelo's "David" and Botticelli's "Birth of Venus" will soon be run by foreign directors for the first time, Italy's Culture Ministry announced Tuesday.

An international search has ended with the selection of 20 new managers - half men, half women - to lead some of the top museum collections in the world. Seven of the candidates are non-Italian with a mix of Germans, Austrians, a Briton and a Frenchman selected.

"It is a historic step for Italy and its museums, which makes up for years of delays, which completes the reform of the ministry and lays the foundation for the modernization of our museums," said Culture Minister Dario Franceschini.

The appointments are part of a ministry-wide reorganization aimed at boosting Italy's capacity to preserve and promote the state's artistic and architectural collections.

Former leadership panned

Italy's museum officials have admitted to a past plagued by mismanagement and neglect.

"The museum system was sclerotic. A weak system: inadequate resources and paralyzing rules," Paolo Baratta, tasked by the ministry to guide the selection process, told the "La Repubblica" newspaper ahead of the announcement.

Among the new managers is German art historian Eike Schmidt, 47, who will take over at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. Another German, 48-year-old Cecilie Hollberg, will head the city's Accademia Gallery.

British-Canadian architect, designer and museum manager James Bradburne, 59, will run the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan.

Austrian Peter Aufreiter, 40, will take over the National Gallery of the Marches in Urbino. Fellow countryman Peter Assman, 61, will run the Ducal Palace in Mantua.

France's Sylvain Bellenger, 60, an art historian, is to take the helm of the vast Capodimonte Museum in Naples. German Gabriel Zuchtreigel, a 34-year-old archeologist, will oversee the Paestum archaeological site near the city.

Sour grapes over picks

The appointment of foreign directors to oversee some of the country's finest treasures has drawn domestic criticism.

Vittorio Sgarbi, an art critic and Italy's former junior culture minister, said the Culture Ministry had embarrassed "his army of excellent Italians."

"Why did there absolutely have to be seven foreigners? And why precisely 10 men and 10 women?" Sgarbi said. "It was a sort of political correctness ... for show."

jar/cmk (Reuters, dpa, AFP)

Nobel's will goes on display for first time

Yahoo – AFP, Camille Bas-Wohlert, 28 March 2015

The last will and testament of Alfred Nobel is displayed at the Nobel Museum in 

the Old Town of Stockholm on March 17, 2015 (AFP Photo/Jonathan Nackstrand)

Stockholm (AFP) - Alfred Nobel's last will and testament, which played a pivotal role in Swedish history by creating the now-illustrious Nobel prizes, has gone on display for the first time in Stockholm.

Until now, only a handful of people had laid eyes on the original 1895 document that has been stashed away in a safe at the Nobel Foundation in Stockholm.

The Nobel Museum has changed all that, putting it on public display as part of its new exhibition "Legacy".

Inventor Alfred Nobel who founded the 

Nobel Prize (AFP Photo)

"The exhibition draws attention to how important it is to pass things on. The will is the centrepiece. It is a simple document, but it still today provides the basis of our work with the (Nobel) prizes," exhibition curator Karin Jonsson tells AFP.

"The aim is to show Alfred Nobel's legacy to the public. It makes him more understandable," her colleague Gustav Kaellstrand adds.

The Nobel prizes are "one of Sweden's biggest brands," notes a spokesman for the Swedish Institute, Sergio Guimaraes.

The will itself is written on four yellowed pages, with curlicued old-fashioned handwriting in black ink. It's smudged in places, and there are notes and additions running up and down the sides, tops and bottoms of the pages.

Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, details the creation of the Nobel prizes on 26 lines, or almost three-quarters of a page.

He stipulates that part of his fortune -- some 31.5 million kronor at the time, or the equivalent of more than 200 million euros ($220 million) today -- was to be placed in a fund, the interest on which was to be used to honour "those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind" in the fields of medicine, physics, chemistry, literature and peace.

He appoints four prize committees to hand out the awards: three in Stockholm and one in Oslo for the peace prize, since Norway was joined with Sweden in a union at the time.

The prize for economics was created in 1968 by Sweden's central bank, the Riksbank, to mark its tricentenary, and is also funded by the Riksbank.

'Who he really was'

Those 26 lines would change Nobel's reputation forever, and shine the spotlight on Sweden for years to come.

Gone is Nobel's image as a dynamite-producing friend of war -- now he is seen as a pacific philanthropist around the world.

"With these prizes, he wanted to show who he really was," explains Jean-Francois Battail, a professor emeritus in Scandinavian languages and literature at Paris' Sorbonne University.

"Albert Einstein, who won the Nobel Physics Prize in 1921, thought Nobel created the Peace Prize because he had a guilty conscience," Battail says.

The will was written in Paris where he kept a home and dated November 27, 1895, and then placed in a safety deposit box at Stockholm's Enskilda Bank.

Nobel died in December 1896 in Italy. When his will was opened early the next year, his family was shocked -- he had told no one of his plans.

"He had no direct heirs, but he left the people closest to him pretty generous sums. They were pretty fatty crumbs. But there were lawsuits, and they tried to have the will annulled -- it didn't transpire peacefully," Battail explains.

"The existence of the prizes is in large part thanks to the will's executors, especially Ragnar Sohlman," he adds.

A former assistant of Nobel's, Sohlman rounded up the fortune that was spread around the world and honoured Nobel's last wishes, going so far as to convince the King of Sweden, who was disgruntled the prizes could be awarded to non-Scandinavians.

The last will and testament of Swedish scientist Alfred Nobel is displayed 

on March 12, 2015 prior to the opening of the exhibition "Legacy" at the Nobel

Museum in Stockholm, Sweden (AFP Photo/Jessica Gow)

Put Sweden on the map

In 1900, Sohlman helped create the Nobel Foundation, which to this day manages Nobel's inheritance and oversees the work of the prize-awarding committees.

The first Nobel prizes were awarded in 1901.

"In Sweden and abroad, a lot of people understood that the will provided Sweden an opportunity on the world stage," Kaellstrand says.

Yet some were already able to predict the headaches that would come with the daunting task of selecting the laureates.

"The New York Times wrote for example in 1897: 'A number of eminent men of Norway and Sweden have a task before them which will inevitably bring to them more trouble than glory'," Kaellstrand muses.

The Nobel prizes have indeed been the centre of controversy over the years.

French writer Jean-Paul Sartre refused to accept the 1964 Nobel Literature Prize, and, more recently, a storm simmered when US President Barack Obama won the Peace Prize in 2009 after less than nine months in office while the US was waging simultaneous wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

But on the whole, the prize has conferred a positive image of Sweden.

Nobel's last will and testament is on display until at least the end of May.

Leopardman vs good missionary: Belgium revamps colonial museum

Google – AFP, Claire Rosemberg (AFP), 31 October 2013

An African man sculpture is displayed at the Museum of Central Africa in 

Tervuren in the suburbs of Brussels on October 9, 2013 (AFP, Georges Gobet)

Brussels — The world's "last" colonial gallery, Brussels' dusty Royal Museum of Central Africa, closes this month to re-emerge with a new vision of the continent more than a half-century after the independence of the former Belgium Congo.

Set to reopen in 2017, the venerable institution has often offended African sensibilities for what is seen as a moth-balled presentation of Africa as it was a century ago.

One Belgium-educated black scholar recalled his distress as a father chased his screaming young daughter around the collection's 1913 "leopardman" statue, crying "Aaah, here come the cannibals!"

A Congo tree is displayed at the Museum

 of Central Africa in Tervuren in the suburbs 

of Brussels on October 9, 2013 (AFP, 

Georges Gobet)

The piece, one of the museum's most controversial, represents the sort of fearsome killer cloaked in a leopard skin whose murderous deeds fuelled Europe's fears of darkest Africa.

It inspired films as well as the politically-suspect adventures of Belgium's own comic book hero in "Tintin in the Congo".

"I decisively told the little girl to stop," wrote Congolese-born Florida professor Jean Muteba Rahier, saying the incident highlighted how the museum peddled "an imperial and racist worldview" of Africans as inferior, bestial and savage beings.

"Africans do not come to visit," Yoto Djongakodi, who heads a committee of African diaspora groups involved in the planned refurbishment, told AFP. "The museum's image must change."

The gallery dates back to 1897, when King Leopold II decided to hold a Congo exhibition to raise funds and find investors for his Congo Free State, a personal property 80 times the size of Belgium and notoriously run like a giant labour camp.

The cruelty of life under the brutal colonial rulers was evoked in Joseph Conrad's 1899 "Heart of Darkness", and denounced more recently in a bestseller by American writer Adam Hochschild, "King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa."

The king's show featured Congo flora and fauna as well as 300 men, women and children shipped to Europe to portray life in an African village built beside a lake at his Tervuren forest estate outside Brussels.

'World's last great colonial museum'

The Africans cooked, played and rowed around the lake in a wooden pirogue. A few died in Tervuren, others on the way home.

A Palace of the Colonies was also built to house what has become the world's biggest anthropological and scientific collection from central Africa.

BELGIUM-AFRICA-MUSEUM-HISTORY-DIPLOMACY (AFP, Georges Gobet)

These include the archives of Leopold's ally, Henry Morton Stanley, best remembered for his legendary "Dr Livingstone I presume?"

The show was a whopping success, drawing 1.3 million visitors in six months. A few years later, in 1908, Belgium finally agreed to take over the colony in the name of the state and in 1910 the massive neo-classical palace currently housing the museum officially opened.

"People often say our museum is the world's last great colonial museum because it carries so many lasting traces of the colonial past," director Guido Gryseels told AFP.

"The permanent exhibition hasn't changed since the 1950s."

With 10 million zoological specimens, 150,000 ethnological items and three kilometres (nearly two miles) of archives, "we have the world's largest central African collection", he said.

As in a time warp, both the glass display cases and the spears, maps, paddles and bowls inside date from the 19th century.

With Stanley's cap, Leopold's ivory bust and a host of stuffed wild animals, the museum evokes an African exotica of costumes and beating drums.

"The museum just doesn't reflect contemporary Africa," said Djongakodi, the Congolese head of the COMRAF group which is working with Gryseels on the revamp.

Shocking to many are early 19th-century sculptures in the entrance of giant-sized European missionaries looking down paternally on pint-sized Africans in loin-cloths.

"Belgium brings civilisation to Congo," says a plaque.

'It's a headache'

An engraved tribute to those who died in the Congo lists 1,508 Belgians but not a single Congolese.

"Not even those who died fighting for Belgium during the two world wars, though there were more Congolese than Belgian deaths," said Djongakodi.

The museum will close its doors on November 30 for the 75 million-euro ($102 million) refurbishment, and challenges abound.

The glass cases and high-ceilinged halls, classified as national heritage, cannot be touched -- precluding the installation of much-needed air-conditioning -- so authorities plan to erect a new building with modern facilities that will connect to the old palace via an underground passageway.

But the test for director Gryseels is to reinvent the museum's image.

Colonial military uniforms and weapons are

 displayed at the Museum of Central Africa

 in Tervuren in the suburbs of Brussels

on October 9, 2013 (AFP, Georges Gobet)

"It's a headache," he said. "Our museum must continue to evoke Belgium's colonial past while becoming a window on Africa today.... and place the accent on African men and women rather than on objects."

"Fifteen years ago it would've been difficult," he conceded.

"Belgium was the last colonial power to question its past. It's a very emotional issue due to the massive number of Belgians who served in the Congo as teachers, doctors, civil servants or soldiers."

Gryseels said his generation grew up proud of having provided roads and schools, though when Congo seized its independence in 1960 it had only 27 university graduates.

The museum itself helped prompt a re-think with exhibitions and talks in 2001 and 2005 that spurred a national debate on the past on a scale not seen in Britain, France, Spain or Portugal.

Until then "the museum symbolised a time when Belgium was rich, when it played a role on the world scene, when it was still the good old days."

Wooden alien lands in Russia

RT.com, 02 August, 2011

Wooden alien lands in Russia

Russia’s first ever statue of an alien has been unveiled near the city of Perm, in the Urals. It marks the site of the most frequent UFO sightings in Russia.

The wooden statue, almost two meters tall, was erected at the entrance to the village of Molebka. This place was not chosen accidentally as it is considered one of the most popular UFO hotspots in Russia, Itar-Tass reports.  Many believe that UFOs land there more often than in other places. The so-called Molebsky triangle was discovered in the 1980s.   

"This is Russia's first monument to a UFO," the news agency quoted Nikolay Subbotin, the head of the Russian UFO Research Station (RUFORS), as saying.

The monument with characteristic alien eyes was done by a local skilled craftsman, carver Viktor Sazanov, and cost local authorities 45,000 rubles (about US$1,600).

Subbotin said that now local ufologists are thinking of opening a UFO museum in Molebka with an observatory shaped like a flying saucer.  They want to send the proposal to colleagues in the US city of Roswell, the most famous zone among ufologists. 

The “first contact” has already been established, as guests from Roswell attended the festival of creativity and design called “Fact and Fiction of the Molebsky Triangle.”

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Traveling UFO museum opens in Istanbul

Hurriyet Daily News, ISTANBUL - Anatolia News Agency, April 6, 2011

Speaking about the project, Sirius UFO Space Science
Research Center Director Haktan Akdoğan said it was
one of the first of its kind in the world.

A touring UFO museum designed by the Sirius UFO Space Sciences Research Center opened Tuesday at Forum Istanbul Shopping Mall. The group said it hopes the documents and evidence contained in the exhibit would convince skeptics of the veracity of claims that aliens walk among us.

Speaking about the project, Sirius UFO Space Science Research Center Director Haktan Akdoğan said it was one of the first of its kind in the world. “The goal of the project is to introduce a global culture to Turkish people and share information proving that we are not alone in the world by displaying written and visual materials, digital photographs, secret documents, certificate of analysis, video visuals, articles and rejuvenations in the specially designed Touring UFO Museum,” he said, adding that the museum was a social responsibility project in the sense of science and culture.

“Mankind’s curiosity and interest in the unknown as well as news and visuals in national and international media about UFOs and extra-terrestrials draw attention to this issue. In this sense, the Touring UFO Museum is expected to attract great interest from the Turkish public as well as from the print and visual media.”

Akdoğan said the UFO museum truck was specially designed. “The museum and exhibition include all incidents related to UFOs since very early periods of our time, official NASA documents, secret documents, kidnappings, UFO photos and video from Turkey and around the world as well as specially made mockups and models.”

The project was launched without any financial support; the Sirius Center used their own resources. The mobile museum will be set up in front of shopping malls and open for visits. Admission is free while the museum is in Istanbul. “But there will be a cover price because of the personnel cost when the museum is set up outside cities,” Akdoğan said.

The project, which was launched in Istanbul, will travel for one year. It will visit many cities, universities and high schools.

“The Touring UFO Museum will also be brought to the United States, South America and Europe. Countries like the U.K., New Zealand and Norway have begun to release their secret UFO documents. There is new significant information and data. This is why our goal is to share this info with people.”

“The museum truck has 20- to 25-year-old documents,” Akdoğan said. “Those who have prejudices about the existence of UFOs will change their mind after visiting this museum.”

The Touring UFO Museum will be open in the parking lot of Forum Istanbul Shopping Mall until April 10. It will also travel to Caddebostan, Taksim and Şişli before leaving Istanbul for Kocaeli, Bursa, Mersin, İzmir, Ankara, Trabzon, Çeşme and Bodrum. It is expected to be visited by 1 million people by the end of the project.