BLOOD MONEY FOR SCOLARI

CHELSEA reject Luiz Felipe Scolari is a winner again.

Just nine months after being sacked by Roman Abramovich, the ex-Blues boss is now a hero after guiding his new club to the title with five games to spare.

Oh, and he also pockets a phenomenal £16MILLION a year - making him the highest-paid coach on the planet and dwarfing his £5.5m Stamford Bridge salary.

Welcome to Big Phil's new world - at the obscure outpost of Bunyodkor Football Club in the heart of Uzbekistan, the dusty underbelly of the old Soviet Union.

The Brazilian World Cup winner, dressed in Uzbekistan national costume, was saluted on TV after Bunyodkor scorched to the title without losing a match, averaging nearly three goals a game.

His team are sponsored by Zeromax, one of the region's leading gas, oil and cotton companies, and play in a plush 15,000-seater stadium in the capital, Tashkent.

It was opened less than two years ago but last August Barcelona president Joan Laporta laid the first brick on a brand new £90m German-designed Football Town complex that is due to be completed in March.

It will house a 34,000-seater stadium, seven training pitches, an arena for other sports, a football academy, a hotel and a new training camp for Bunyodkor. Scolari lives the life of luxury with his family in a huge mansion complete with garden and swimming pool.

Nightmare

It sounds like heaven; the perfect riposte to Abramovich's axe and all those snipers who branded him a failure after his seventh-month stint at Stamford Bridge.

But Scolari works against a sinister political backdrop of tyranny in a country whose human rights issues have become a nightmare for Amnesty International.

Enemies of 71-year-old dictator Islam Karimov are shot in the street and he has even been accused of poaching people to death in vats of boiling water.

More than 6,000 political and religious prisoners have been locked up under the vile regime and in May 2005 hundreds of Uzbekistanis were slaughtered at Andizhan.

Young children are still used as slave labour in cotton plantations owned by the state, despite Karimov's promises to end this exploitation.

Schools and colleges are forced to send their students to the fields, while in some regions officials ban the sale of petrol to stop families taking their children away from the the cotton picking.

Questions are being asked about the morality of Scolari's comfortable position with accusations that his huge salary comes directly from the slave labour of the cotton-field kids.

Money

SCOLARI: New adventure

Scolari, 61 next month, insists money is not the main reason he took the job in June and claims he could make as much coaching in Europe - even though his current salary is three times what he earned at mega-rich Chelsea.

"I know I'm at the right place, at the right time and at the right team," he says. "Uzbek football now creates its own success story, especially Bunyodkor with its remarkable dynamism and prospects.

"Money is absolutely not the main reason I came to work in Uzbekistan.

"I could be making as much in Europe. But at the top European clubs, managers are under constant pressure, they need to win every game.

"Here in Tashkent I have time to think about more global things, the atmosphere is more relaxed and creative.

"I like the people in Uzbekistan. They are open and very hospitable."

But former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray (right), told the News of the World: "I am deeply disappointed by the actions of Scolari.

"It is obvious to every visitor to Uzbekistan that they are in a totalitarian dictatorship with zero human rights. Scolari's huge salary comes directly from the slave labour of young children in the state cotton plantations. Football has sold its soul."

Poverty

And a diplomat currently working in Tashkent added: "The Brazilian is a fig leaf.

"The regime has almost no backers in the world so they abuse football and buy off big names in an attempt to make their people think Uzbekistan is respected throughout the world.

"Rivaldo now plays here. There are rumours that Raul will come. Samuel Eto'o was tempted with an eye- watering contract. In fact, this is a country which tortures its people, dissent is crushed, the media is emasculated, elections are farcical, a third of the population live below the poverty line, and child labour is rife. Just look at the cotton fields. They are using football to mask all this."

Scolari, who won the World Cup in 2002, agreed an 18-month deal to succeed fellow Brazilian legend Zico, who led the club to a League and Cup double and the Asian Champions League semi-finals last year before taking charge at CSKA Moscow.

Rivaldo, a key member of Scolari's Brazilian World Cup winners, is Bunyodkor's top scorer and in the second year of a contract that earns him in excess of £10m at the age of 37.

"It was an exceptional proposal for me and my family," he admits.

The club, although only four years old, also made an audacious £15m bid to sign striker Samuel Eto'o from Barcelona for just TWO MONTHS.

"My head started spinning when I heard what they offered," admits Eto'o.

Bunyodkor paid a fortune for him to visit the club alongside Barca team-mates Andres Iniesta and Carles Puyol, while Arsenal skipper Cesc Fabregas was reportedly paid £700,000 for a similar trip.

But Uzbeks dare only whisper the name of the real backer behind Scolari's team.

Nominally it is Miradil Djalalov - nicknamed Adil the Richman - who runs Swiss-based company Zeromax.

A Tashkent journalist, who asked not to be named for fear of reprisals by the dreaded secret police, said: "Everyone knows that the real power behind Bunyodkor is the president's daughter Gulnara Karimova, and that it is part of a crude public relations strategy to make her popular enough to assume the leadership when her father is laid in his mausoleum."

The club have been helped to thrive by a number of decrees from president Karimov which have removed tax from football investment.

And glamorous 'princess' Gulnara is an intoxicating mix in a land where the average pay is around £20 a month: Harvard graduate, judo black belt, pop diva with the name Googoosha, fashion icon, jewellery designer for Chopard and diplomat to the United Nations.

A billionaire, she is probably the richest woman to emerge from the collapse of the Soviet Union. In deference to her poverty-stricken people, she sometimes wears Dior outfits from the previous year's collection. Though not often.

Murray was sacked by the British Labour government after speaking out about the use of torture in a country that, at the time, was a Western ally in our war on terror.

Hitler

And he slams Barcelona's controversial 'agreement' with Bunyodkor while having a shirt sponsorship deal with UNICEF, the United Nations agency which is supposed to look after children.

"It is like linking up with Adolf Hitler to promote a Berlin team in the 1930s," he says.

"It really is astonishing even in the money-mad world of football to be quite that blind to morality."

But Scolari refuses to talk about the politics of his new job.

And in an effort to smooth the waters, his personal interpreter Dilmur Khaitov insists: "Luiz Felipe does not flaunt his money.

"On the contrary. He does not like luxury. He doesn't use a chauffeur and drives himself around the town in a Toyota car provided by the club.

"He has modest tastes in clothes. The only really expensive thing I've seen him wearing is a watch."

In that case, Big Phil should have a lot of change from his £16m . . .

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