Fake Sheikh Faces More Trouble

After the BBC Panorama where John Sweeney laid bare the repellant behaviour of Mazher Mahmood, aka the Fake Sheikh, and his support team, including those working in the service of Creepy Uncle Rupe, it was widely assumed that Mahmood, who had been suspended by the Sun, would be keeping schtum and lying low for a while. But that kind of assumption reckons without the principle-free environment of Rupe’s Red Tops.

Mazher Mahmood - looking out for 13 pissed off footballers

The alleged Inquiry into Mahmood’s activities, if it has actually reported, has not had any of its findings made public. The only conclusion is that either it is still going on, or News UK has unearthed some very bad things indeed. Either way, they should not be letting him return to his job. But that is exactly what Press Gang has asserted, and, worse, the Murdoch press is not prepared to deny it.

“Source says Fake Sheikh back in action, working from his Kensington home, apparently for the Sun” told Press Gang, following with “Sun spokesman has just said the paper has ‘no comment’ to make on claim that Fake Sheikh working again” [Mahmood is clearly a property snob: his place is not in Kensington, a name which enjoys a certain cachet, but in Earl’s Court, which definitely does not].

And Maz may not be venturing out into west London too much in the near future, if he has read the Guardian’s article on footballer Stephen Dawson, who, last April, “was arrested on suspicion of involvement in a major spot-fixing scam, whereby players supposedly took bribes in return for deliberately getting booked”. So who did this involve?

As if you need to ask: “He was one of 13 players – all of whom denied any wrongdoing and have since been cleared – collared by the NCA [National Crime Agency] following an alleged sting by Mazher Mahmood, the so-called ‘fake sheikh’ who had written a front-page article in the Sun on Sunday the previous December under the headline ‘Ex Prem stars in match fix probe’. Within hours of receiving information from Mahmood, the NCA swooped on the players”. But now the case has collapsed.

And what Dawson has told the Guardian may not make comfortable reading for the Fake Sheikh: “He still intends to get to the bottom of the accusations that were made against him. ‘This was not a mediocre little thing,’ he says. ‘Somebody tried to wreck my career and I was told I could do serious prison time. That’s not something you can let go lightly. I want to find out who dragged me into it and try to get some sort of justice’”.

So perhaps Mazher Mahmood and his minders at the Murdoch press would like to assist Stephen Dawson with his enquiries. One can only hope for their sakes that this was not another of those occasions when someone’s career was about to get trashed, and the Fake Sheikh was caught on camera laughing about it. Dawson was only one of several players wrongly fingered. None of them will be happy bunnies right now.

Let’s see your evidence for that “match fix probe”, Murdoch doggies. No pressure.