TTFA president John-Williams speaks out

John-Williams made the state­ment dur­ing an in­ter­view on i95.5FM on Sat­ur­day night while speak­ing An­dre E Bap­tiste on his Is­ports pro­gramme, about the state of foot­ball in the coun­try and ad­dress­ing con­cerns dur­ing his three and a half year term so far.

He said, "When we came in­to pow­er, we in­her­it­ed over $21 mil­lion TT in debt, which we found af­ter the au­dit­ed ac­counts were fi­nal­ly done for pri­or years to our ap­point­ment, and as we speak we have since done au­dit­ed ac­counts for 2016 and 2017 both com­plet­ed and now un­der­tak­ing 2018,”

He said, "Just last week, we re­ceived an­oth­er claim for work done pri­or to be­ing elect­ed to of­fice and again I nor the Board had no pri­or in­for­ma­tion. There's al­so an­oth­er claim we are deal­ing with for over $15 mil­lion which was signed off by a pre­vi­ous pres­i­dent of the Foot­ball Fed­er­a­tion. There are a lot of fires that we are hav­ing to out be­fore we even start.”

“How­ev­er, I am not about giv­ing up, we have a task ahead to put T&T Foot­ball back in or­der in terms of fi­nances, that is why the Home of Foot­ball is ex­treme­ly im­por­tant in that re­gard, as a rev­enue earn­ing cen­tre and we ex­pect to open this fa­cil­i­ty by the end of May," ex­plained John-Willaims.

John-Williams al­so re­spond­ed to a judg­ment won by Look Loy re­lat­ed to the – Home of Foot­ball say­ing, “We will en­sure that the judg­ment that was hand­ed down will be ful­filled and the stat­ed in­for­ma­tion passed on to Kei­th Look Loy, we are not cer­tain, why this mat­ter reached all the way to the courts, be­cause a lot of what was asked for, we have re­vealed in our meet­ings last year with a doc­u­ment on the home of foot­ball list­ing all the mat­ters, but we have no prob­lem with show­ing the re­quired in­for­ma­tion, as we are very con­fi­dent in all our process­es.”

With ref­er­ence to the freez­ing of the TTFA Bank Ac­count fol­low­ing a rul­ing of the Courts, John-Williams said, "This again was in­curred pri­or to our ap­point­ment and if one looks at the in­for­ma­tion, there is no doc­u­men­ta­tion, a lot of the in­for­ma­tion is word of mouth, in terms of con­tracts and com­mit­ments, but we have ap­pealed that and it will be heard on April 4th.”

John-Williams, the for­mer own­er of lo­cal pro club W Con­nec­tion, stat­ed, that 95% of the cas­es brought against the TTFA at present are re­lat­ed to mat­ters pri­or to 2016, and in a lot of cas­es, we just did not have the mon­ey, or could not find records or fig­ures to sub­stan­ti­ate the claims, and we have to en­sure that all doc­u­men­ta­tion is in place, so we have to be vig­i­lant in this re­gard.”

With all that, the TTFA has faced and with re­gards, all the blame placed on his, John-Williams ex­pressed cau­tion about whether he would seek an­oth­er term in of­fice when his first term ends in No­vem­ber. He said, "I have not made up my mind as yet, let us wait and see. I have a job to do and I al­ways com­plete any task that I am giv­en and I love foot­ball.”

“Look­ing ahead to the Gold Cup in June, we have some oth­er warm-up match­es com­ing up and that will as­sist Den­nis and the team, it was a good fight­ing per­for­mance against Wales giv­en all that is go­ing on, but I be­lieve like the rest of the Board that Den­nis is the man to lead us in foot­ball, that is why we agreed to re­new his con­tract, there were per­sons that want­ed cer­tain in­for­ma­tion to be made pub­lic but Den­nis came and gave his strong thoughts and fair opin­ion and all was set­tled in that re­gard. Mem­bers of the pub­lic are call­ing on the TTFA to stage match­es in here, but we have no mon­ey for that. , We trav­el abroad be­cause our ex­pens­es are picked up by the host­ing coun­try. That's the main rea­son we play out­side of T&T.”