FIDE internal fighting

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Chris Rice
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Re: FIDE internal fighting

Post by Chris Rice » Wed Apr 11, 2018 4:53 pm

Peter Doggers has interviewed Makro on his announcement to run for FIDE President. It appears only last month there was going to be a candidate for the FIDE President from the United Arab Emirates but for some reason the person withdrew. Makro seems very confident that he can win and he has confirmed Malcolm Pein will be involved. On the FIDE bank problems, an emergency solution has been proposed:

"What if nothing changes, what will you do on 1 May?

“We are preparing some solutions. We have a very interesting and generous offer from our Vice President Khalifa [Mohammed Al-Hitmi, the President of the Qatar Chess Association - PD], who said: ‘OK guys, if FIDE gets such a serious problem, then you can use my money and my accounts. I am ready to pay on behalf of FIDE until you solve your problem.’ Which is something of course. In an emergency situation, we will be able to pay salaries, for example. But this can only be a temporary solution."

NickFaulks
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Re: FIDE internal fighting

Post by NickFaulks » Wed Apr 11, 2018 6:06 pm

Chris Rice wrote:
Wed Apr 11, 2018 4:53 pm
Peter Doggers has interviewed Makro on his announcement to run for FIDE President.
I'd say this is straight up. Makro has always said that he didn't want to be President and I believe that. Why should he, when he doesn't relish globetrotting and can run the show from Athens as Deputy President? Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be anyome else. Personally, I wish there was, because over the course of decades he has alienated quite a lot of people and they will yet again feel that they are voting for someone who would not be their ideal choice. Most of them will certainly now see Kirsan as completely unsupportable and the result cannot be in doubt, but it is still a shame.

As to Kirsan queering the pitch for other candidates, I have said this before but the West ( this forum being a good example ) cannot or will not accept that he is in much of Asia a hugely respected figure. In addition, there is great sympathy for his treatment at the hands of the US Treasury, who have thrown him into the financial equivalent of Guantanamo. This will not be sufficient to get him re-elected, but his access to high places can still to some extent undermine his successors.
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David Sedgwick
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Re: FIDE internal fighting

Post by David Sedgwick » Wed Apr 11, 2018 7:38 pm

Chris Rice wrote:
Wed Apr 11, 2018 4:53 pm
Peter Doggers has interviewed Makro on his announcement to run for FIDE President.
Makro has now confirmed publicly what I had heard privately from two different sources.

NickFaulks wrote:
Wed Apr 11, 2018 6:06 pm
I'd say this is straight up. Makro has always said that he didn't want to be President and I believe that.
Maybe, but I cannot find anything in the article to substantiate your belief. If I recall correctly, Makro planned to stand for President in 1994.

NickFaulks wrote:
Wed Apr 11, 2018 6:06 pm
Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be anyone else. Personally, I wish there was, because over the course of decades he has alienated quite a lot of people and they will yet again feel that they are voting for someone who would not be their ideal choice. Most of them will certainly now see Kirsan as completely unsupportable and the result cannot be in doubt, but it is still a shame.
It will be interesting to see whether a third candidate throws his or her hat into the ring, possibly Anatoly Karpov as suggested in that Russian article which you posted. I think that such a candidate could do surprisingly well on the first ballot.

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Re: FIDE internal fighting

Post by NickFaulks » Wed Apr 11, 2018 11:14 pm

David Sedgwick wrote:
Wed Apr 11, 2018 7:38 pm
NickFaulks wrote:
Wed Apr 11, 2018 6:06 pm
I'd say this is straight up. Makro has always said that he didn't want to be President and I believe that.
Maybe, but I cannot find anything in the article to substantiate your belief. If I recall correctly, Makro planned to stand for President in 1994.
My use of the word "always" was careless. It was not intended to go back as far as 1994, an interesting period about which I have little knowledge.
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NickFaulks
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Re: FIDE internal fighting

Post by NickFaulks » Wed Apr 11, 2018 11:30 pm

David Sedgwick wrote:
Wed Apr 11, 2018 7:38 pm
It will be interesting to see whether a third candidate throws his or her hat into the ring, possibly Anatoly Karpov as suggested in that Russian article which you posted. I think that such a candidate could do surprisingly well on the first ballot.
Anyone present in Khanty-Mansiysk for the 2010 election would be asking Karpov the question "you made it pretty clear then that you had no real interest in the job, so why should we believe that you genuinely want it now?".

I would agree that the water might be warm for a serious and non-aligned third party candidate. They'll need to get cracking, though.
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Roger de Coverly
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Re: FIDE internal fighting

Post by Roger de Coverly » Wed Apr 11, 2018 11:34 pm

NickFaulks wrote:
Wed Apr 11, 2018 11:14 pm
It was not intended to go back as far as 1994, an interesting period about which I have little knowledge.
Unexpectedly Kasparov endorsed the continued Presidency of Campomanes when Makro had to concede that the 1994 Olympiad couldn't be held in Salonika and organisers in Moscow stepped in to run it. It was later suggested that Campo had been agreeable to some form of reunification deal between the PCA and FIDE. All this failed when FIDE ran out of money and had to accept a bailout from Kirsan, who had his own ideas on how world chess championships should be organised. Early adopters of "the Internet" got a ringside seat through the newsgroup "rec.games.chess", the coverage by Mark Crowther's TWIC and the compuserve chess forum.

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Re: FIDE internal fighting

Post by Chris Rice » Thu Apr 12, 2018 9:43 am

The minutes of the 2017 first quarter Presidential Board meeting in Athens, Greece 25-26 March 2017 which FIDE has released are an astonishing read.

Kevin Thurlow
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Re: FIDE internal fighting

Post by Kevin Thurlow » Thu Apr 12, 2018 9:56 am

"Astonishing" is a good word...

The English is frequently obscure, so much that I am not sure if the following is what they meant...

"Mr. Merenzon shows the budget of the New York match, they were in shock, even Mr. Filatov was in shock when he saw amounts for security and cakes."

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Christopher Kreuzer
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Re: FIDE internal fighting

Post by Christopher Kreuzer » Thu Apr 12, 2018 10:17 am

:shock:

You feel sorry for some of the sensible people there who are trying to make the best of a bad business...
FIDE minutes wrote:Mr. Vega said he is the eldest person present at the meeting, He wanted to speak as an old man. We should stop the discussion now. We do not want to see the harsh exchange between President and acting President or Deputy President, it is not good for FIDE.
Am trying to connect this to some of the pictures and reports from March 2017.

This is the Chessbase report on the meeting in question (with some pictures):

https://en.chessbase.com/post/power-str ... hess-world

There was a meeting in April 2017 as well:

https://en.chessbase.com/post/stalemate ... r-struggle

Have the minutes of that meeting been released as well?

There was also a meeting I remember reading a report about, with some pictures of Kirsan looking tired and arriving with someone to help him communicate (a translator or personal assistant?), but I can't find that again right now. I think it was the one in April 2017:

https://www.chess.com/news/view/ilyumzh ... ident-3728
Chess.com wrote:Kirsan Ilyumzhinov was the last to arrive in the meeting room on the fourth floor. It was quarter past nine. Joined by his assistant Berik Balgabaev, the FIDE president was smiling to everyone, but looked tired.
That is the one I was thinking of, the April 2017 extraordinary Presidential Board meeting.

Though the reports of such meetings all start to blur into each other after a while!

OK, they were both PB meetings, one the normal scheduled one (in March), where Kirsan did his "I resign, I resign" bit (and then tried to retract it afterwards). And the April meeting was the (seemingly more restrained) one that was called at short notice (an 'extraordinary' meeting).

Roger de Coverly
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Re: FIDE internal fighting

Post by Roger de Coverly » Thu Apr 12, 2018 10:35 am

Christopher Kreuzer wrote:
Thu Apr 12, 2018 10:17 am
You feel sorry for some of the sensible people there who are trying to make the best of a bad business...
The minutes seem to imply some connection between Kirsan and Agon, being that Kirsan financed Agon in some manner and would now like to own it in lieu of debt repayment, or was he owning or financing it all along, despite the denials of the late Andrew Paulson?

There's a claim that Kirsan recently won a libel case against a little known British publisher.

http://kirsan.today/en/opinion/item/225 ... at-it.html

Are there any independent reports of a court case?

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Re: FIDE internal fighting

Post by JustinHorton » Thu Apr 12, 2018 10:42 am

If I read the minutes rightly, Agon had two weeks to pay six hundred grand, and that two weeks must be up about now, yes?
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Roger de Coverly
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Re: FIDE internal fighting

Post by Roger de Coverly » Thu Apr 12, 2018 11:03 am

JustinHorton wrote:
Thu Apr 12, 2018 10:42 am
If I read the minutes rightly, Agon had two weeks to pay six hundred grand, and that two weeks must be up about now, yes?
That was around a year ago, so something must have been sorted out given that the Grand Prix series has been concluded and a Candidates Tournament has taken place.

There were also revelations about the "pay to play" income made by Agon for places in the Grand Prix, one of the financiers of this being Kirsan himself.

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Re: FIDE internal fighting

Post by Alex Holowczak » Thu Apr 12, 2018 11:27 am

JustinHorton wrote:
Thu Apr 12, 2018 10:42 am
If I read the minutes rightly, Agon had two weeks to pay six hundred grand, and that two weeks must be up about now, yes?
By the time of the FIDE Congress in Antalya last October, there were still some unpaid payments. There are so many of these that it's hard (for me) to keep track of exactly what has been paid and what hasn't. So these new Antalya debts might have been freshly acquired debts rather than the ones they had to pay at the time of the March 2017 PB meeting.

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Re: FIDE internal fighting

Post by Roger de Coverly » Thu Apr 12, 2018 12:07 pm

The FIDE website puts some context and time line on these extracts
http://www.fide.com/component/content/a ... board.html

You get a sense of a organisation or organisers regarding themselves as under siege, presumably from the evil Kasparov and his accomplices. Kirsan though rather confirms he's living on another planet. If he is asked to give up his powers as FIDE President, that has to include all the world travel and meeting government and political figures. There's also an admission that he doesn't just act as FIDE President but also as a representative of Russia.

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Re: FIDE internal fighting

Post by JustinHorton » Thu Apr 12, 2018 1:38 pm

Roger de Coverly wrote:
Thu Apr 12, 2018 11:03 am
JustinHorton wrote:
Thu Apr 12, 2018 10:42 am
If I read the minutes rightly, Agon had two weeks to pay six hundred grand, and that two weeks must be up about now, yes?
That was around a year ago
Ah yes, the old "wrong year" error, like Arthur Daley's cheques
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