Lasana Liburd updates the ongoing saga of the Soca Warriors’ bonus battle.
Trinidad and Tobago’s 2006 World Cup football players are on the verge of a rare piece of sporting history-five years after T&T became the smallest nation to qualify for the FIFA showpiece tournament.
On February 17, acting High Court Judge Devindra Rampersad will deliver a verdict based on the accounts submitted by the Trinidad and Tobago Football Federation (TTFF) for the period surrounding the Germany 2006 World Cup and the response to those figures by the players’ legal team. And, remarkably for the murky world of international football, one of FIFA’s member nations will be forced to come clean on its bookkeeping.
Maybe.
The TTFF’s financial figures have been so flexible of late that an offer of $5,644.08 per player in October 2006 mushroomed, within two years to $192,600 each-ostensibly based on the same revenue stream recorded in the same accounting books.
Eight players, including defender Dennis Lawrence off whose head came the goal that beat Bahrain and put T&T in Germany, are known to have accepted the latter offer. The other seven are Carlos Edwards, Jason Scotland, Clayton Ince, Densill Theobald, Marvin Andrews, Chris Birchall and Ian Cox.
Team captain and ex-Manchester United star Dwight Yorke and current National Coach Russell Latapy also accepted, independently of their teammates, a settlement which, it is widely accepted, was negotiated privately.
The Warriors who chose to keep legal pressure on their former employers are Kenwyne Jones, Stern John, Shaka Hislop, Kelvin Jack, Atiba Charles, Cyd Gray, Avery John, Brent Sancho, Aurtis Whitley, Collin Samuel, Anthony Wolfe, Cornell Glen and Evans Wise. It only cost them five years, four court cases and approximately $3 million—and counting!—in legal fees. Not to mention, of course, that some of them also lost their right to a place on the national team since the Germany World Cup.
God knows what the TTFF, whose financial affairs continue to be directed by their multi-portfolioed Special Adviser, FIFA Vice-president and Minister of Works and Transport Jack Warner, will now offer to the remaining 13 players. Or, better yet, what the players are actually worth.
And, the question has to be asked, would God share such information with the High Court? Either way, interested observers are strongly advised to have an accredited accountant on speed dial this February.
The TTFF ran up against their latest legal red light on November 15, 2010 when Court of Appeal Judge Rajendra Narine dismissed their request for a stay on the case, which is before Justice Rampersad, as well as on the decisions thus far made by him (Rampersad).
The TTFF, who are represented by English QC William Mc Cormick and local attorneys Om Lalla and Kelvin Ramkissoon, are appealing Justice Rampersad’s decision to uphold a 2008 ruling by the London-based Sport Dispute Resolution Panel (SDRP). It bears repeating that the SDRP was actually the arbitrator chosen in the first place by the football body after it baulked at paying out the requested monies when the World Cup players initially filed suit at the local High Court in 2007.
In layman’s terms, Warner’s team appears to be seeking consistently to buy time, striving with little or no regard for the clock to find a court that would provide an agreeable verdict, agreeable, that is, to the TTFF.
Like the High Court and SDRP before it, the Court of Appeal did not quite manage to meet the TTFF’s wishes.
The football body argued that, should their appeal prove successful, they would struggle to recover any payments made to the players-who are represented by British lawyer Michael Townley and local counterparts Dave De Peiza and George Hislop-as well as the “substantial legal costs and the expense of time and manpower” needed to bring their audited books to court.
The TTFF was concerned, too, about the “valuable judicial time and resources” that would go down the drain in showing 13 football players the money collected as a result of their on-field exploits.
To the chagrin of the TTFF, Justice Narine was decidedly unimpressed by both arguments. He ruled that the TTFF had failed to provide any evidence to suggest that the organization would be unable to recover payments made to the Warriors. And, more importantly, – more ominously seen from the perspective of the TTFF – he described the prognosis for a successful TTFF appeal as “not encouraging.”
So, come February 17, the TTFF must return to stand and be heard before Justice Rampersad. The likelihood is that they will face the double indignity of having queries raised about the quality of their accounting as well as of being ordered to make an interim payment that could range between $20 and $44 million.
Initially, the TTFF claimed that revenue from the 2006 World Cup amounted to just over $18 million. Fortunately for the litigant Warriors, information released by the Trinidad and Tobago Government in accordance with the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act revealed an adjusted figure of nearly $174 million. It is a gap that will take some bridging, if not in strictly financial terms at least certainly as far as credibility goes.
Little wonder then that sources suggest the TTFF is actively pursuing a private settlement with the 13 persistent players whom Warner and TTFF General Secretary Richard Groden once publicly derided as “greedy mercenaries”.
FIFA has made little secret of its distaste for all courts and has thumbed its nose at political and legal systems all over the world. In tiny Trinidad and Tobago, 13 footballers are seemingly mere weeks away from lifting the veil of secrecy that has so far shrouded a member association which happens to have at its helm controversial FIFA Vice-president, Austin Jack Warner.
Whether it be from Andrew Jennings (Foul) or Valentino Singh (Upward Through the Night, From Zero to Hero and Legacy of the Soca Warriors) or from some other as yet undiscovered author with a grounding in accounting, you cannot but feel that this history is one for the books.