A football fan who berated England’s World Cup team after intruding into their dressing room has been fined after admitting being in an area without authorisation, a court heard on Wednesday.
Pavlos Joseph, 32, from London, paid a fine of around $100 on Tuesday, his lawyer told a hearing of a special World Cup court in Cape Town.
“The admission of guilt fine in the amount of 750 rand was paid by the accused yesterday on a charge of contravening section six, subsection one, of the Fifa Act … namely being in a designated area without being in possession of an accreditation pass,” his lawyer Craig Webster told the court.
Mthunzi Mhaga, a spokesperson for the prosecuting authority, said that the admission of guilt meant he had been formally convicted.
“He has a conviction in respect of the charge that he was facing,” said Mhaga.
A British tabloid newspaper journalist, Simon Wright, has also been charged with harbouring Joseph in the aftermath of the intrusion which followed England’s 0-0 draw with Algeria in Cape Town on June 18.
Wright, who works for the Sunday Mirror, had his case postponed when he appeared before the court on Wednesday.
In an interview with the newspaper after the match, Joseph insisted that he had wandered by chance into the dressing room as he was looking for a toilet.
He said he had told former England captain David Beckham, now a member of coach Fabio Capello’s backroom staff, that the team’s performance had been a “disgrace” before being told to leave by an official.
Beckham brushed off the incident, saying it had been “blown out of proportion”.
But the England team were furious that Joseph had not been apprehended at the time and it later emerged that the British princes William and Harry had been in the same room only minutes earlier.
South Africa’s national police commissioner Bheki Cele has said the episode was part of a deliberate plot to expose security mistakes by his force.
Announcing Wright’s arrest on Tuesday, Cele said accused the reporter of having put Joseph up in a hotel under a false name after the intrusion.
“The police strongly believe that the motive was to put the World Cup security in a bad light and possibly to profit from this act,” he told reporters.
A spokesperson for the paper insisted Wright had done nothing wrong, saying “any suggestion that he or the newspaper was involved with Pavlos Joseph before he entered the England dressing room is entirely false.” — AFP