‘"I'm looking forward to seeing the BBC's comedy of errors," Mike Morris, the business partner of Jason Ferguson, told me last week.
‘I'd called Morris, a Monaco-based agent, to tell him that our programme would reveal details of a huge payment - £750,000 - made to him by Manchester United in connection with the sale of Jaap Stam in 2001, a staggering fee which United admitted paying when on Tuesday they published the internal review into their transfer dealings that had been demanded by the club's largest shareholders. Jason Ferguson's company, Elite Sports, was also paid - but by the buyers Lazio.
‘It meant that what it took for a world-class player such as Stam to move from United to another club was one huge payment to the manager's son's agency and, at the other end of the deal, another to the manager's son's business partner.
‘There was a programme to be made that could shed new light on the business relationship between Sir Alex's son's football agency and the biggest club in the world.
‘Within weeks there were promising leads. I was tipped off that there was more to the Massimo Taibi deal, a gaffe-prone goalkeeper United sold to Reggina in January 2000. I phoned Taibi's agent Fabio Parisi in Milan and he was amazed to learn United had paid Jason's company £50,000 to shift the keeper. "No! That's not true!," he said. "I did the deal myself!"
‘So why did United hand a cheque to Jason Ferguson's company? The club have yet to answer. Conveniently, their internal review had a cut-off point of 2001 and not 1998 as the "99 Questions" originally demanded.
‘I was certainly never going to get an answer out of Jason Ferguson, it seemed, about Taibi or any of the other findings in the programme. Jason, according to a source who knows him well, has always had a simple tactic when it comes to the media. Head down, say nothing. When I first spoke to Francis Martin, a fellow director of Elite, to ask for an interview he said: "You'll have to ask Jason. He's our spokesman." A spokesman who doesn't speak.‘
BBC3, tonight, 9.30pm; BBC1, tomorrow, 11.30pm