Warner to FIFA: You’re destroying the Caribbean region
Former FIFA vice president and CONCACAF president Jack Warner sent FIFA president Sepp Blatter and his organization a Christmas present on Friday and as you can guess, it wasn’t gift wrapped with pretty bows.
In a critical, seven-page statement about international soccer’s governing body, Warner claimed FIFA was engaged in a hostile take over of the Caribbean Football Union. Members of the CFU met in Zurich, Switzerland to reorganize its organization in what was considered in many quarters as the biggest scandal in soccer in 2011.
Warner claimed that FIFA had “no locus standi or even hierarchical relationship” with the CFU.
“I am no longer prepared to sit back and watch from the sidelines, while a few men destroy an entire region for their own selfish and self-serving motives,” he said in a statement.
Warner was forced to step down from both positions for his alleged part in the scandal. He and former Asian Soccer Confederation head Mohammed bin Hammam of Qatar tried to bribe Carribean Football Union officials to vote for the former against the incumbent Blatter in the FIFA presidential election. The plot was found out, and bin Hammam was banned from the game. Several CFU officials were suspended and Warner resigned.
Now Warner is on the warpath once again.
Warner called this meeting unconstitutional.
“At this unconstitutional CFU congress, certain decisions were taken by the FIFA president, decisions which the presidents of 26 of the 30 national associations present accepted without even consulting their members who they purported to represent,” he said.
Warner, the minister of works and infrastructure in the People’s Partnership Government in his native Trinidad & Tobago, said the soccer leaders from Anguilla, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Jamaica and Trinidad & Tobago did not support FIFA “and its unethical actions.”
Some of those action, according to Warner, included:
The appointment of a normalization committee to execute various tasks on behalf of the CFU, the appointment of an interim CFU general secretary, the review of the new CFU statutes to be proposed by the CFU Legal Committee, the preparation of the 2011 annual report, setting a deadline for a CFU extraordinary congress to approve the new CFU statutes within 90 dates of Dec. 20.
“Never in the history of the FIFA has an organization that is not a member of FIFA been subject to the ‘law’ of FIFA,” Warner said.
Warner said he would have more to say on Wednesday.
“In one fell swoop, the Caribbean football leadership has now undone its struggle of some 33 years and has disrespected the entire region,” Warner said in his statement. “The arrogance with which the FIFA continues to ride roughshod over duly elected officials of both the CFU and the CONCACAF is not just unethical but plain outright immoral.
“It demonstrates the crass disrespect to the independence and sanctity of the constitutions of both organizations because the FIFA imposes on these two organizations its will which is neither recognized by FIFA’s constitution nor the constitutions of the CFU and the CONCACAF.
“This type of behavior must never be allowed to continue without a voice of dissent being raised against such malfeasance.”
