FIFA meeting off, as questions linger over undelivered OB vans

FKF elections. Stakeholders to wait longer to know exact date of Fifa meeting

Veron agrees to meet Zambian minister, Kenya’s CS kept waiting as BDO LLP administrators of WTS Media Group Ltd, which collapsed with FKF’s Sh125m extend stay to next year.

The joint administrators appointed to try and revive WTS Media Group Limited, the company Football Kenya Federation (FKF) paid Sh123,175,693 for a yet to be delivered Outside Broadcasting van, have extended their administration to April 1 next year.

It means any efforts to recover the fortune advanced to Kenya by the world football governing body under the Fifa Forward programme will not commence until after 2021 subject to a report by the Joint Administrators, BDO LLP.

The OB van was FKF’s flagship project laid out in a Sh215 million proposal in which Fifa approved and disbursed Sh135 million. The local FA was to foot the other Sh80million.

The project has featured prominently in the bungled FKF elections, which a section of stakeholders insist is the elephant in the room after Fifa rejected a request by the Sports Disputes Tribunal to form a Normalisation Committee to handle the elections.

“A normalization Committee would get to the bottom of all these deals and that is why Mosengo-Omba would never dare constitute one,” Lordvick Aduda, a former FKF CEO told Standard Sports yesterday.

“The SDT ruling on December 3 last year, which Fifa agreed with and the ruling on March 17 makes for a strong case for Fifa’s intervention yet in Mosengo-Omba’s wisdom he has purported to extend the life of FKF’s National Executive Committee, a pronouncement that flies against not only reason, but a properly constituted Sports Tribunal,” Aduda said.

He added: “His (Mosengo-Omba) decision to honour an invite by Zambia’s Sports Minister to go to Lusaka to resolve a similar problem while conveniently trashing a Tribunal’s request or even engage Kenya’s sports minister speaks volumes.”

FKF president declined to comment on this story.

In a letter to FKF, and not even copied to Kenya’s Sports Cabinet Secretary on March 25,  Mosengo-Omba said: “Should the world health situation not evolve positively by 6 April 2020 (today), we shall contact you to explore other possibilities including a meeting by video conference.”

Over the weekend, Sports CS Amb. Amina Mohamed said they had not received communication from Fifa regarding the proposed meeting even if via video conference. The meeting, however, is off due to travel restrictions occasioned by the coronavirus pandemic with most people working from home making video conference not feasible either.

The Kenyan situation has placed Mosengo-Omba in the eye of a storm. A Fifa spokesperson told Standard Sports on March 30 that they will continue to monitor the matter and will provide further updates in due course.

Mosengo-Omba, then Fifa’s head of Africa and Caribbean Member Associations is said to have approved the project and, according to FKF, sent experts to Nairobi to evaluate some OB vans believed at the time to belong to WTS Media Group Ltd.

It turned out, after FKF had paid as much as $1,080,000 on March 14, 2018 to WTS Media Group Limited, that the vans did not legally belong to the UK-based company.

Strangely, FKF say they got to know of WTS Media Group’s financial distress sometime in 2017 the same year the group somehow reported making a profit.

A closer look at WTS Media Group Limited Financial Statement as at June 30 2017 shows a negative figure of £668,235 considering £3,093,572 cash in hand and overdrafts of £3,761,807.

Worse still, WTS Media Group’s Financial Statement strangely compares the 2017 figures with the 2015 and not 2016, a move that should have raised Fifa and FKF’s eyebrows on the curious financial reporting.

It was a matter of time before WTS Media Group Ltd was declared insolvent and put in administration on April 11 last year.

The deal has featured prominently in FKF’s bungled elections, twice nullified by the Sports Tribunal.

The first time, FKF was found to have violated the Fifa Standard Electoral Code and later inserting an eligibility clause for candidates that ensured the President and his deputy returned unopposed while 39 Counties out of 48 saw officials re-elected without challengers.

Despite FKF’s glaring poll blunders, Fifa is willing to let Kenya’s officials hold office raising the question whether there a correlation between the blatant violations with the undelivered OB vans.