Harry's Games by John Crace

another security code that would now need to be changed.
    Had he thought he was due a ten per cent bonus for the sale of Peter Crouch? ‘Well, morally, yes, because Mr Mandaric had said Crouchie was a basketball player and I’d be owing him ten per cent on the money Portsmouth lost. But my new contract said five per cent so that’s what I got.’
    Did he remember signing the form allowing Mandaric to transfer money out of his account to America? ‘No. He must have typed it up and I just signed it. Everyone will tell you, I can barely read or write. To be honest, we were playing Man United later that day and I was more worried about marking David Beckham.’
    Did he ever ask Mr Mandaric how the investment was doing? ‘Once, after we won at Blackburn. Disaster! He told me it had been a total disaster. Everything had been lost and he’d try again. The lads thought it was really funny when I told them; they said that would be the last I ever saw of the money. To be honest, I never thought about the account again until years later.’
    Why had he lied to Rob Beasley? ‘Why should I tell a
News of the World
reporter the truth? He didn’t tell me the truth. All I was interested in was getting him off my back. We were playing Manchester United in the Carling Cup Final the next day and I could do without a whole load of distractions in the paper on the morning of the game. I was more interested in telling him that it wasn’t a story, that the money wasn’t a bung. Explaining the legal difference between a loan and a bonus was the last thing on my mind.’ And so it continued.
    The only time Redknapp cracked was when he snapped at the police officer who had led the dawn raids on his house – alongwith a photographer from the
Sun
– and was sitting with the prosecution team. ‘Mr Manley, will you stop staring at me,’ Redknapp said. ‘I know you are trying to cause me a problem.’
    How a photographer from the
Sun
came to be tipped off about the exact time of the raid was just one of the questions that went unanswered during the trial. But whatever the problem Redknapp thought the police were trying to cause, it was soon dealt with as Detective Manley was nowhere to be seen in court the following day.
    The picture that emerged of Mandaric and Redknapp wasn’t just of a happy-go-lucky, disorganized business arrangement between friends; it was of another world, the world of professional football, where large sums of money are the norm for the very successful. This wasn’t a particularly easy defence to sell to a jury – many of whom may have been struggling to get by on £20,000 or less a year – and so this point was never once laboured or spelled out. But it was implicit throughout the proceedings. Mandaric was worth £2 billion, Redknapp earned more than £5 million per year and £100,000 was a relatively inconsequential amount that can be easily forgotten. In the year Mandaric had invested and lost the money for Redknapp, he had lost £17 million in other deals. In other failed transactions, Redknapp had suffered an £8 million loss on a property development and had lost his son a considerable amount of money on a dodgy stock market tip.
    This idea of attempting to avoid paying an ‘inconsequential’ sum was the unspoken essence of the defence closing speeches. Why on earth would either man go to all that risk and effort just to save about £30,000 in tax? Mandaric had paid £100 million in taxes over the previous ten years and had paid much more than he had needed to for Leicester City and Sheffield Wednesday. They’d been bought after he’d sold Portsmouth, but before, rather than after, they had gone into administration.
    Redknapp himself had paid more than £8 million in tax and, if he was really so financially opportunistic, why had he given the £140,000 compensation he was due on leaving Portsmouth in