AFRICA :NEWS,CULTURE, CHINA/AFRICA/WORLD

Thousands of fake or bogus tickets for the football World Cup this summer in South Africa are being sold on websites including Gumtree for many times their face value, an investigation by The Times has found.

Fifa, the competition organiser, said that sellers were seeking to profit from fans desperate to get to the now sold-out England group games, semi-finals and finals.

The Metropolitan Police central e-crime unit said: “Tickets will only be issued in South Africa for the World Cup. So anyone claiming to be able to supply tickets will be either supplying counterfeit tickets or nothing will be received.

“Given that tickets for the World Cup can only be collected in South Africa, it appears that any site offering tickets will have criminal intent.”

Fifa confirmed that it would not issue paper tickets until a few weeks before the competition starts — supplying them to the original applicant at collection points in South Africa. It said that if tickets listed for sale at sites other than Fifa’s are not fakes, they must have been allocated to other names, and should not be resold.

Fifa said: “Genuine tickets are sold online exclusively via the official website Fifa.com. A special team from Fifa’s legal affairs division is working with international authorities to monitor the internet for such illegal offers and to take action to combat them.”

Nevertheless, companies in Britain and overseas are openly reselling tickets for sold-out matches at a hefty mark-up.

Fifa’s rules state that tickets may only be used by the ticketholder named at the time of purchase, whose name will be printed on the ticket. Some resellers may attempt to have the name changed to the new buyer’s by abusing Fifa’s ticket transfer policy. This permits name changes for non-commercial reasons, such as illness.

The seller behind the first World Cup ticket listing that The Timesviewed on eBay, the auction website, admitted to this. “kobi5842” wanted a starting bid of $3,400 (£2,223) or a “buy it now” price of $5,400 (£3,531) for two tickets to the World Cup final with a total face value of $1,200. He wrote: “I will try my best to personalise the tickets to the buyer of this auction, but I won’t refund the sales amount in case Fifa does not agree.”

This user’s account was suspended by eBay for suspected fraud after our intervention. However, he was back online at the time of writing, with a “100 per cent positive” feedback rating. eBay said: “In accordance with English and Welsh law, eBay UK strictly prohibits the resale of tickets to the Fifa World Cup. We do not allow anyone to list or purchase such tickets on eBay.co.uk and we prevent users from bidding on or buying tickets from sellers outside of the UK.”

No such measures were in place at Gumtree.com, the listings site, where The Times found “Mark” offering “VIP Suite” tickets to all England matches, and various others, for £2,500 each. He posted two mobile phone numbers and an e-mail address as contacts. Another user claimed to have “bought lots of tickets trying to ensure I gained a good selection of games”, leaving 22 for resale.

Gumtree said: “We were alerted to a small number of ads which have now been removed, and we have updated our detection technology… we always do our very best to prevent ads selling football tickets from appearing on the site.”

England fans hoping to buy valid tickets should go to Fifa.com on April 15 when returns may be available. Tickets are still available as part of travel packages from Fifa-approved tour operators.

Fans pay dearly

WHISTLER, B.C. - Two weeks ago, in one of the training runs at the Alpine skiing venue for the Vancouver Games, spectators and racers gathered at the finish were delighted to see a lynx dart across the race course.

Saturday they will get to see a snow leopard, coming straight down the hill toward them.

Kwame Nkrumah-Acheampong, the first ever Winter Olympian from the African nation of Ghana, is on the start list for Saturday’s men’s slalom, the final Alpine skiing event of the 2010 Olympics. Having developed an affectionate following within the sport, he has embraced the nickname “The Snow Leopard,” and the uniforms of the Ghana Ski Team, of which he is the only member, have a leopard-print motif.

Out of 102 racers, Nkrumah-Acheampong starts 102nd. His goal is finish somewhere better than last.

“My expectations are to put down two good runs and make myself, my coach, and my family and fans proud,” said Nkrumah-Acheampong. “Some of the racers who are on the slope who I train with know that I can ski, but for the rest of the world and the general public I need to prove myself again.”

Since learning to ski eight years ago at an indoor ski slope near London, Nkrumah-Acheampong has steadily improved, hiring his own coaches and staff and training in places like Italy and France. With no team backing his Olympic quest when it began, Nkrumah-Acheampong had to negotiate the bureaucratic side of competition on his own. In an interview with the Daily News on Thursday, he explained how he worked out endorsement deals with hotels, resorts, and airlines.

“I’ve been able to wangle and wrangle and struggle and find deals here and there,” said Nkrumah-Acheampong.

While Nkrumah-Acheampong is a long way from the top slalom racers in the world, like Julien Lizeroux of France orReinfred Herbst of Austria, he has improved to a respectable level and slipped under the world-rank threshold required for Olympic participation. And yet he feels as if every time he comes to a new race, he has to prove himself to everyone on the mountain.

“People are curious to find out, can this chap really ski,” he said, explaining how racers and coaches from other teams stop what they are doing to watch him in a training course. “Every time it’s like proving you can ski. Once I go through the course, they come over to me and say ‘oh good, we didn’t expect you to be able to make it through.’ Sometimes its funny, sometimes it’s irritating, because I had a struggle to get here. Definitely I had to go through some gates sometime back there to get here.”

Nkrumah-Acheampong’s coach is former Uzbek racer Denis Grigorev. He also has a team of administrators who run a Web site and field an ever-increasing number of media inquiries. With him at these Games are his wife, Sena, his mother and father, and his two children, his one-year-old son, Jason, and six-year-old daughter, Ellice.

There will also be a number of curious onlookers back home in Ghana, and Nkrumah-Acheampong hopes that some of them can take advantage of the small sport infrastructure he has built up to make the road a little easier for the next skier from Ghana.

“I think the future depends on what I do on Saturday,” Nkrumah-Acheampong said earlier this week. “If I go up there and fall, six, seven times, it’s a waste of Olympics coming here. But I have to ski like I’m looking for the fastest line. If I crash while skiing very fast, Dennis and I will be happy because I’ll be skiing to my limit. But if I hesitate, we waste the opportunity, so it’s about destroying the course as quickly as I can.”

MOSCOW (Dow Jones)–A consortium led by Russian oil major OAO Lukoil Holdings (LKOH.RS) said Friday it has discovered a major hydrocarbon structure off the coast of Ghana.

The consortium, which also includes Vanco Energy and Ghana National Petroleum Corp., or GNPC, said it discovered “a significant hydrocarbon accumulation” in the Dzata structure, which is part of the Cape Three Points Deep Water Block in the Gulf of Guinea.

Lukoil is 20% owned by U.S. oil firm ConocoPhillips (COP).

Company Web site: www.lukoil.com

-By Jacob Gronholt-Pedersen, Dow Jones Newswires; +7 495 232 9197; jacob.pedersen@dowjones.com

By Eduard Gismatullin

Feb. 26 (Bloomberg) — OAO Lukoil , Russia’s second-biggest oil producer, and closely held Vanco Energy Co. made “a significant” oil and gas discovery off Ghana.

The partners together with Ghana National Petroleum Corp. drilled a well at the Dzata field of the Cape Three Points deep- water block in the Gulf of Guinea, Moscow-based Lukoil said today in a statement. The Dzata-1 well, drilled to a depth of about 4,500 meters (14,500 feet) tapped a 94-meter-thick hydrocarbon column.

“The primary reservoir sandstone contains gas and light oil,” Lukoil said. “The newly discovered hydrocarbon reserves are assumed to be quite significant.”

Ghana is set to become one of Africa’s newest oil exporters in late 2010 when production begins at the Jubilee field, which has potential resources of as many as 1.8 billion barrels, according to Tullow Oil Plc, its operator. Jubilee is located about 70 miles from Lukoil and Vanco’s prospect.

Lukoil plans to drill three exploration wells offshore Ghana and neighboring Ivory Coast, Chief Executive Officer Vagit Alekperov said in April.

–Editors: Will Kennedy, Amanda Jordan.

To contact the reporter on this story: Eduard Gismatullin in London at egismatullin@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Will Kennedy at wkennedy3@bloomberg.net

- A stampede has left 24 people dead including children and at least 20 others injured, some seriously, in Timbuktoo in northwest Mali.

Sources from this holy town told Xinhua on Friday that the incident originated from an old lady who collapsed in one of the town’s streets at the fall of darkness the previous day.

She collapsed not far from a public place where a crowd had gathered to listen to the Maouloud sermon, a religious activity to celebrate the birth of Prophet Mohamed.

The passers-by decided to run and save the poor lady and this precipitated the movement of the crowd.

“The people then started running towards all directions certainly thinking that it was a rebel attack. You know that in such a situation, everybody becomes unconscious. The people ran into all directions and those who fell were unfortunately trampled on,” said Ha-dara, a well-known figure in Timbuktoo.

The town was in shock on Friday morning following the tragedy.

A hospital source said the toll rose to 24 from 15 confirmed dead earlier in the day, adding some of the injured were in critical condition and needed to be urgently evacuated to the capital Bamako.

“We cannot rule out the fact that the number of those injured will increase because some of them are still hiding in their homes instead of coming to the hospital,” local officials said.

“The injured people have been arriving this morning,” another hospital source told Xinhua, but did not wish to be named as they were waiting for official communication from the regional authorities.

In Bamako, everybody is trying to get information about their family members.

“I have managed to speak to my family and they all seem to be alive. But they are naturally shocked by this tragedy which took away lives of some of the people they knew,” said Alhamady Cisse, a press correspondent in the Malian capital.

Timbuktoo, the City of 333 Saints, is always crowded during the Maouloud festival, when thousands of pilgrims, some natives of the region and others foreigners, come to celebrate the birth of Prophet Mohamed in a big religious ceremony.

A few years back, several heads of state including Moummar Gaddafi of Libya came to celebrate Maouloud in the town.