Twenty-four hours after we published a story that everyone at FIDE is now a lawyer, Malcolm Pein filed. Not at CAS. On Facebook, which in chess governance is the court of first instance.
Pein is England's delegate to the European Chess Union, its Honorary Vice President, and a man who has spent thirty years putting chess into schools and columns into the Telegraph. He does not post with a heavy heart often. This time he says he did, and then called for an Emergency General Assembly to remove Zurab Azmaiparashvili as ECU president.
The charge is simple. Zurab endorsed a FIDE presidential candidate in his capacity as president. Not as a private citizen, as the head of the body. The board, Pein says, was not consulted. Imagine the president of UEFA announcing, without asking anyone, that Europe backs a particular man for FIFA president. Then imagine he does it a month before the vote.
Zurab's defenders will say the ECU president is entitled to an opinion. True. But the ECU has many federations, and Zurab was elected by them, in a landslide, to run European chess, not to deliver it to a FIDE presidential candidate. There is a difference between having a vote and casting everyone else's.
Now the procedure, because this is FIDE and procedure is where the fun is. Under ECU statutes, 18 federations can force an assembly within a month. Eighteen is not many. It is fewer than the number of federations who voted for Zurab, which is the point: Pein is going after the people who elected him, and asking them whether they got what they voted for. That is a sharper play than any lawsuit. Lawyers can delay a verdict for years. A vote takes an afternoon.
The date matters too. A month from now the FIDE election will be over. Whatever happens in Samarkand, Zurab will go home to a Europe that has just been asked, on the record, whether it still wants him. If his candidate wins, he has spent his presidency on a favour. If his candidate loses, he has spent it on nothing.
Pein ends the letter with a line every chess player understands: "Zurab, this is one move you won't be able to take back."
He's half right. In chess you can't take a move back. In FIDE you can always appeal. But in this case, the danger for Zurab Azmaiparashvili, a seasoned chess politician, is that if the FIDE presidential candidate he backed, loses, he will have a harder time assembling support for his own vote of confidence.