If Premier League chief executive Richard Scudamore was determined to keep South American football-style transfer market investors out of English football, the deepening financial crisis meant other clubs in Europe needed them more than ever. As the credit crunch spread, and Portugal requested a €78 billion bailout, the circle of investors advancing money to clubs widened to include businessmen who were close to Portuguese Prime Minister José Sócrates.

While in Brazil everyone from taxi drivers to pop stars took stakes in the future transfer rights of players, these types of investment were less common in Portugal. They were usually restricted to some of the richest and best-connected businessmen, who mixed with powerful team executives.

Among them was Paulo Lalanda de Castro, a 53-year-old Portuguese pharmaceuticals executive living abroad in a hilltop mansion a short walk from FIFA's $250 million headquarters in bucolic surroundings on a hill above Zurich. Lalanda de Castro lived in a mansion built on the side of the hill, a leafy and tranquil enclave where the Swiss elite enjoyed fine homes with views of Lake Zurich and the snow-capped Alps.

He was a board member of Octapharma, a Swiss company that manufactured potentially life-saving medicines made from human plasma for patients in intensive care. He had joined the company in 1986, just three years after it was founded. The family-owned company, which on its website described human plasma as a “precious raw material”, was now turning over more than €1 billion a year. At the same time as helping save lives around the world, Octapharma was also making its directors wealthy. In 2009, Lalanda de Castro and nine other board members shared in €30 million of dividends.

The following summer, Lalanda de Castro struck a deal with FC Porto to acquire a 25% stake in the transfer rights of Brazilian striker Walter da Silva for €2 million through a company based in London's Chancery Lane, called Pearl Design Holding Ltd. By financing part of the fee paid to Brazil's Internacional of Porto Alegre, Lalanda de Castro made it possible for the Portuguese club to sign the player, who two years earlier had broken into Brazil's Under-20 team.

Walter was the youngest of six children raised by his mother, Edith, in a violent slum in the city of Recife. His 18-year-old brother was shot dead in a gang battle and he only went to school between the ages of 7 and 12. Edith managed to scrape money together to buy him football boots and get a grant for him to play in the academy of Sport, a local first-division club. It paid off: Walter scored plenty of goals, winning him a $5,000-a-month contract with Internacional in the southern city of Porto Alegre at age 17. He spent half the pay cheque to help his mother buy an apartment in one of Recife's smarter neighbourhoods.

Investors like Lalanda de Castro used UK companies for investments because they were easy to set up and, as a legacy of its colonial empire, the British Isles has tax treaties with tiny islands in the Caribbean such as Turks and Caicos and the British Virgin Islands. Setting up a company in the UK can be done online in as little as 24 hours, and costs £15. One of the few requirements is that the company has a physical address in the United Kingdom. You don't even need to say publicly what the company actually does. Lalanda de Castro hired a compatriot on the board of 80 companies in the UK and Spain to be the only public-facing official of Pearl Design Holding Ltd.

Routing transfer income offshore via London was not new in football. In 2004, Selkan Ltd, based in London's Mayfair and controlled by another company in the British Virgin Islands, helped FC Porto sign Luís Fabiano from São Paulo. When the Brazilian striker joined Sevilla for a transfer fee of €20 million the following year, it netted Selkan a return of almost €10 million.

To fund Da Silva's move to Porto, Juan Figer – the chess champion turned football agent – chipped in a €2 million loan via For Gool Co., the company that gave its address as 35 Princess Street in a scruffy part of Rochdale. The names of Pearl Design and For Gool were only made public because Porto was listed on the stock exchange and had to disclose details of all its financing deals, but the identity of Lalanda de Castro and Figer remained a mystery to all but the people involved in the transaction.

UEFA, in whose Champions League competition Porto was a regular competitor, did not know who was behind the companies. UEFA's then general secretary Gianni Infantino was exasperated. “We cannot go to the company and say please tell us who you are and what you're doing,” Infantino said. “They will tell us: who are you to ask me?”

Infantino appealed to the UK government for help identifying the shareholders. While there was no suggestion of any impropriety, he wanted player trading to be more transparent. He received some support when a member of parliament brought up the issue in a debate about football governance.

Damian Collins, the MP for Folkestone, had gathered with other members of the Culture, Media and Sport Committee in a meeting room off Westminster Hall on the banks of the River Thames. The room was up the stairs from the 70 m-long Westminster Hall where Kings Charles I was tried for treason. The meeting was more of a talking shop than an urgent matter of state. The committee discussed the foreign ownership of UK football clubs such as Manchester City (owned by Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan) and at times the atmosphere, following lunch, had the conviviality of a gentleman's club.

One of the pleasures of discussing sport was, said chairman John Whittingdale, another Conservative MP, discussing the topics people talk about “in living rooms, pubs and cafes”. When, barely 10 minutes into the three-hour debate, another MP told how he had been a supporter of Stoke City since the age of five and requested an endorsement of the club's English owner Peter Coates, there were smiles all round. Whittingdale remarked how, before the committee meeting, they had had a sweepstake on how far into the debate he would mention Stoke City.

Collins, who gave intense interviews to media about suspect sports governance, was serious in his tone about how the “letterbox” companies were using the UK to anonymously funnel loans to Porto. “When we have a largely unregulated transfer market bringing billions of pounds into and out of the country, parliament should take an interest,” Collins said. He said it was “almost impossible” to identify the companies' owners and recommended a closer look.

His comments did not gain any traction. The other members of parliament present seemed more concerned about English football clubs than FC Porto. Nor was there any official response from the government on the matter. It was hardly unusual that foreign businessmen were using UK companies anonymously. Thousands of others did the same.

Government officials defended the procedure to us by saying that they had the right to privately request the names of the shareholders. They could also, if they felt it necessary, investigate the source of the income by making enquiries with former colonies in the Caribbean.

Because there was no suggestion of any impropriety, UEFA was not permitted to peer over the wall to find out who was funding one of the teams in the Champions League. We only found out about Lalanda de Castro and Figer's loans three years later, through people involved in the deal. By the time we did find out, Lalanda de Castro was in the public spotlight for an unrelated matter after it emerged that he had arranged for former Portuguese Prime Minister José Sócrates to become an Octapharma consultant for a reputed fee of €12,000/month.

When Portuguese prosecutors began investigating Sócrates's finances, Lalanda de Castro was named as an “arguido” – the equivalent of a suspect under Portuguese law. Both men denied wrongdoing. Prosecutors gave few details of their investigations and more than 2 years later, in early 2017, prosecutors had not filed charges against either of them.

Lalanda de Castro's bet on Walter, the striker brought up in poverty, was not turning out as planned. He failed to earn a first-team place at Porto and, with his weight ballooning, was loaned out to Brazilian clubs Cruzeiro and Goiás. He became a figure of fun in his home country after his weight rose to 106 kilos and he was invited on to a popular chat show to talk in a light-hearted manner about his diet and craving for custard cream biscuits.

The remarkable thing was that he retained his instinct for goal, scoring 24 goals in as many games for Goiás, even if he did need to go on a diet. On the chat show, and down to 92 kilos while on loan at Rio's Fluminense, Walter wore a smart white shirt with the sleeves rolled up to show a tattoo of his mother Edith's name on the underside of his forearm.

In spite of his weight problems, Fluminense agreed to pay FC Porto €2 million for 25% of Walter's rights – exactly the amount Lalanda de Castro had loaned the Portuguese club. And even if there was no attractive financial return for the Octapharma executive, Lalanda de Castro at least had a clause in his deal with the Portuguese team that protected his investment. He got all of his investment money back with interest.

Two more men close to José Sócrates, the now former Prime Minister, were among the small circle of investors seeking profit from the transfer market. Carlos Santos Silva, a boyhood friend, and Rui Pedro Soares, one of his Socialist Party colleagues, had arranged transfer finance deals with Beira-Mar and other Portuguese clubs lower down the food chain than FC Porto. While the Premier League had banned this practice in England, in Portugal it was allowed and Portuguese officials even defended it as a way to help clubs who could not get bank finance.

Soares, once a youth-team player for Porto who had helped Sócrates become the Socialist Party leader, was bullish about the project in an interview with Publico newspaper. “On an export level,” Soares said, “football must be bigger than Port wine. It's one of the viable businesses at the moment.”

For Beira-Mar and other small clubs, prospects were darker than the colour of the fortified wine. Portugal had spent €600 million of public money getting 10 stadiums ready for the 2004 European Championship. The national team championship had brought tens of thousands of tourists. Television pictures showed off the country's quaint baroque architecture and golden beaches, bringing millions of euros worth of advertising. Portugal reached the final, losing 1-0 to Greece.

Now, a few years later in the dark days of the financial crisis, clubs such as Beira-Mar that had inherited these stadiums were struggling to pay the bills: the electricity charges for its $120 million arena on a highway outside the coastal town of Aveiro ran to €111,000/year. Match attendances had shrunk to 1,000 in a stadium with a capacity for 30,000. In an embarrassing low point, Beira-Mar would have to start a first-division match in 2012 with eight players after most of the squad handed in resignation letters over unpaid wages.

Portugal's former Economy Minister Augusto Mateus suggested that the empty arenas should be demolished. Maintaining a loss-making football arena with public money simply did not equate to preserving a school or hospital, Mateus said. “It's very difficult to service debt on something that doesn't create wealth or represent the public interest,” he said.

For the outgoing prime minister's friends Santos Silva and Soares the numbers did add up. They saw a 34% return on their investment in the defender Yohan Tavares when, a few months later, he moved to Belgium's Standard Liège from Beira-Mar for €500,000. At the end of 2013, after acquiring the rights of a dozen players, their trading company had cash assets of €1.9 million.

Aside from nominee directors and letterbox companies, the UK offered other ways to hide the identity of shareholders from the general public. So-called bearer share companies, which could also be set up in a matter of hours, granted the holder of a share certificate the right to ownership of a corporation. Functioning like cash, the certificate did not have the name of the owner, so if it became lost or stolen there was no way to find out who it belonged to. These shares had mostly been phased out in the USA since 1982 because of their potential use in tax evasion and money laundering, but because of the mystical nature of such certificates they would remain part of Hollywood movie scripts. In the 1988 film Die Hard starring Bruce Willis, criminals take over an office building to steal $640 million of bearer bond certificates from a vault.

In 2002, Maurizio Delmenico, a Swiss lawyer in his late 40s, had set up a London-based bearer share company called Robi Plus Ltd that bought transfer rights. Delmenico had offered auditing and tax advice to the wealthy for two decades and, through his friendship with former Belgian footballer Luciano D'Onofrio, had become involved in the sport. D'Onofrio was the general manager of Porto for six years through to 1991, before becoming co-owner and president of Standard Liège from 1998 to 2011. The same year that D'Onofrio acquired a 25% stake in Standard Liège in a buyout with Adidas CEO Robert Louis-Dreyfus, Delmenico was elected onto the board apparently as his representative.

Two days after Christmas 2011, Delmenico acquired 10% of the rights of Porto players Eliaquim Mangala and Steven Defour on behalf of Robi Plus. That meant the company's bearer share certificate was worth at least €1.25 million. While Delmenico was the front man for the company, it was not clear who its shareholders were. Again, UEFA executives were frustrated by the UK's corporate rules. “Who is actually controlling these players?” Andrea Traverso, UEFA's head of licensing, asked. To make matters more nebulous, a Malta-based company whose shareholders were not made public acquired a 33% stake in the rights of the same footballers.

Playing out in the background was a long-running investigation in Belgium. In 2004, prosecutors began an investigation into Standard Liège's transfers dating back to the late 1990s. They formally accused D'Onofrio, Delmenico and about 20 other former directors, players and agents of crimes including tax fraud. They denied wrongdoing. The case moved at a snail's pace for more than a decade, but prosecutor Frederic Demonceau briefed us on some details. He revealed that another London-based bearer share company, Corporate Press Ltd, had been involved in Standard Liège player transfers. The company, based in the City of London and overseen by Delmenico, was set up in 2002 and voluntarily struck off in 2011.

Delmenico told us that he had set up the companies in London because he had business there. He would not say who the real owner of the companies was. Nor would D'Onofrio. When approached about Robi Plus by a reporter for France Télévisions one night in late 2012 outside his Liège apartment, the trim 57-year-old former footballer sprinted away through its narrow paved streets. The young French journalist, carrying a cardboard cutout of Mangala as a prop, gave chase for several hundred metres before giving up. By phone, D'Onofrio told the reporter “do what you have to do, but leave me in peace”.

In March 2013, Robi Plus paid Lisbon-based Benfica €500,000 for the transfer rights of two 19-year-old players from Guinea-Bissau (one of the world's poorest countries, with an average annual per capita income of $600). The arrangement was a moral risk, according to Gregor Reiter, legal counsel at the European Football Agents Association, because African players are particularly vulnerable to pressure from officials to move clubs. “We have to draw the line at players becoming a commodity,” Reiter said. One of the teenagers, 6-foot-1 João Mário Nunes Fernandes, was moved on by Benfica to Portugal's Atlético and second-division Desportivo de Chaves. The other, Luciano Teixeira, a 6-foot-2 defensive midfielder with a Mohican haircut, went on to play four games for France's Metz before ending up at Chaves too. By May 2015, Delmenico said he'd sold the rights of Robi Plus's players to another company. He told us he “couldn't remember” who the buyer was.

The following month, the investigation in Liège was winding up. But just as D'Onofrio was close to exhausting a second and final appeal to stop a trial, he signed a deal with prosecutors to drop the charges. The arrangement involved D'Onofrio paying more than €1 million, according to Belgium's La Nouvelle Gazette newspaper. His lawyer, Me Delbouille, told the newspaper that his client maintained his innocence and the deal allowed him to look to the future serenely and “not have to look into the rearview mirror all the time”.

In the UK, tax avoidance – legally using often-complex corporate structures to pay less tax – had become a key political issue. Not because of the secretive football deals that were frustrating European football executives at UEFA, but after it emerged that Google, Starbucks and Amazon were using complex accounting methods to save hundreds of millions of pounds. The news caused public uproar, triggering lawmakers to take action – a reaction that the anonymous football funding had failed to ignite. It was “The Great British Tax Robbery” according to an opinion piece in the Daily Mail newspaper, which said that the UK was offering too many incentives for “smart” private equity owners. Company executives were hauled before parliament for questioning. Margaret Hodge, a Labour MP, told a Google executive that its accounting practices were not illegal, but immoral.

In October 2013, at a conference in London about transparency in government, Prime Minister David Cameron announced that it would do exactly what European football's UEFA had been asking: show who really owns companies. The UK government, Cameron told delegates from around the world, would require companies to publicly disclose shareholders with more than 25% of their equity. At the same time, Cameron said the UK would also ban the 1,220 bearer share companies by requiring them to convert to registered shareholders. The use of nominee directors, while not being outlawed, would also be tackled with more monitoring, Cameron said. “We need to know who really owns and controls our companies, not just who owns them legally, but who really benefits financially from their existence…For too long a small minority have hidden their business dealings behind a complicated web of shell companies.”

In the summer of 2015, four months before its shareholders would have had to go public for the first time under the new legislation, Robi Plus's Switzerland-based director Maurizio Delmenico withdrew the company from the UK company registry.