‘Cannot deal with a partner who has such business culture’

FIDE president Arkady Dvorkovich has accused organisers of Freestyle Chess of leaking personal texts sent him during the terse negotiations over the past few months.
Dvorkovich told The Indian Express in an exclusive interview on Tuesday that messages that he had sent Jan Henric Buettner, the man behind the freestyle chess tour, were being shared with players ‘within seconds’ during the negotiations.
FIDE president Arkady Dvorkovich speaks at an event during the FIDE World Chess Championship in Singapore last year.(PHOTO: FIDE/Maria Emilianova)
After talks between FIDE and organisers of Freestyle Chess collapsed on Monday, Buettner posted a long open letter addressed to the FIDE president where he also made public personal messages sent to him Dvorkovich. Soon, this was followed Magnus Carlsen sharing on X messages sent Dvorkovich to his father to convince the world no 1 to play in the FIDE World Blitz Championship in December. Soon, Carlsen’s trainer Peter Heine Nielsen also shared private messages sent to him FIDE CEO Emil Sutovsky in 2018.
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“The thing I understood from many sources, many people told me that Buettner is actually leaking all our communications to all players immediately. Seconds after we wrote things in our personal WhatsApp conversation. For me, that’s just wrong business ethics. I cannot deal with a partner who has such a business culture, such business ethics. For me, it’s a red line,” Dvorkovich told The Indian Express. “Actually, Buettner was the one who told me that our communication should just be between us; but he was the one who was leaking messages. I was informing him whenever I wanted to communicate something to the FIDE board. But he was sending our communications to people without informing me about it. For me, it’s just not proper.”
He slammed organisers of Freestyle Chess for leaking private messages.
“Maybe leaking personal messages is a part of their business culture. It’s totally against my culture. What is private, it is private. When it is public, it is public. You should get permission or you should at least tell the person that you are going to go public with what was personal. Doing this secretly is just improper business culture that I cannot accept. I cannot shake hands with people who do this.”

Amit Kamath is Assant Editor at The Indian Express and is based in Mumbai. … Read More