FIFA to probe Antigua football

ST JOHN’S: Soccer’s world governing body FIFA will send a fact-finding team to Antigua and Barbuda next month as it considers lifting a suspension of funding for the Caribbean country, officials said yesterday.

The board of the Antigua Football Association was dissolved in March amid corruption allegations. A three-member interim committee appointed to investigate its accounts last month accused former executives of misappropriating hundreds of thousands of Eastern Caribbean dollars. The sport will “rise again” in the two-island nation, but only after FIFA officials investigate, said Jack Warner, a FIFA vice president and head of the Caribbean Football Union. Two FIFA officials will meet with elected officials and committees in Antigua the first week of August and report back to the world body, Warner said. The world authority has been corresponding with two former officials at the centre of the committee’s allegations, Ralph Potter and Chet Greene. Both men have denied any wrongdoing.

The interim committee said it found evidence that the US$1 million (EC$2.67 million) of FIFA’s Financial Assistance Programme Fund was used by a member of the organisation for personal use and that thousands of dollars have been misappropriated or unaccounted for. Warner, however, said the committee has no authority in the eyes of the world body. “In FIFA, the only people we recognise are the bona fide elected persons of the Antigua FA and until they are removed by an election call for that purpose, we will not recognise anybody else,” he said. The interim committee was not immediately available for a comment.