‘Time to disband football committee’

President of the Veterans Footballers Foundation of Trinidad and Tobago (VFFOTT), Selby Browne said the time had come for the normalisation committee currently running the country’s football to end its work.

The committee, chaired by business executive Robert Hadad, was appointed three years ago by Fifa, the world governing body for football, after administrative turmoil and mounting debt looked set to cripple the operations of the Trinidad and Tobago Football Association (TTFA).

The mandate of the committee to remodel the operations of the TTFA included clearing the association’s substantial debt, amend its constitution, establish more suitable governance arrangements, and arrange fresh elections.

Browne, however, is among a group of critics that believe the committee has not lived up to the mandate and feels that the annual general meeting of the TTFA set for March 18th next year (2023) must be the final act for the governing group.

“The unfortunate reality is certain members of the NC (normalisation committee), and present and past members of the TTFA, for some unknown reason, have been of the view that the NC has been placed to administer football in T&T for eternity, and not a contractor appointed to complete a mandate within a specific period, for which due payment is made,” Browne told the Trinidad Guardian newspaper.

“You retain the services of a contractor to perform certain services, and upon completion of the items listed in the mandate, you perform the final act for which you are paid and return to your respective areas of competence.”

But, he added: “The normalisation committee has been appointed and is paid by Fifa to complete a mandate within a specific period, in this case for a two-year period initially and extended by a further year. It is quite possible the normalisation committee may wish to beg Fifa for additional time to complete the work originally assigned for a two-year period.”

The work of the committee was put under the microscope in recent days after a news release from Maria Daniel of Ernst and Young Services Limited, the committee-appointed trustee, who has brokered a debt-repayment plan for the TTFA under the Bankruptcy and Insolvency Act, funded by an interest-free U.S. $3.5 million loan, which must be repaid in 10 years.

There seems, however, to be a great concern by the financier – speculated to be Fifa – that a new TTFA executive may not continue to meet its obligations under the terms and conditions of the loan.

Browne said VFFOTT was not officially notified about the financier of the loan, but this was one of the things requested when the foundation wrote to the TTFA secretary on Christmas Eve.

“That information has been requested by VFFOTT letter of demand to the TTFA general secretary (acting), in addition to the copy of the minutes of the meeting called by the normalisation committee to present for the TTFA membership approval, the petition presented to the High Court of Justice of Trinidad & Tobago on behalf of the TTFA membership and approved on September 28th, 2022,” he said.

Browne said he also disagreed that decisions taken at an extraordinary general meeting (EGM) of TTFA members on December 10th, including that the committee must wrap up its work before the March deadline, may place payments to the association’s creditors, as Daniel indicated when she wrote to them on December 16.

“Any attempt that seeks to indicate the grounds for the inability of the trustee and the normalisation committee to implement the scheduled pre-Christmas payments to creditors, which was formally announced and confirmed with the TTFA creditors, cannot be as a result of the outcome of the December 10 TTFA EGM called by the normalisation committee,” he said.

“The pre-Christmas schedule must have been predicated on the preparation and deliverability of the relevant undertaking of Section 1.7 of the proposal and agreement having been made by both the trustee and the normalisation committee in its petition presented to the High Court of Justice of Trinidad and Tobago on behalf of the TTFA membership.

“The inability to make the promised pre-Christmas payments has two things to do with the TTFA EGM of December 10, the first is ‘nothing’, and the second is ‘absolutely nothing’.” (CMC)