Valenti­no Singh

If I were for­mer FI­FA vice-pres­i­dent Jack Warn­er, I'd be look­ing to send a thank you card to the per­son who leaked the in­fa­mous Caribbean Foot­ball Union's (CFU) video record­ing, now be­ing pro­mot­ed on the Lon­don Dai­ly Tele­graph.As a mat­ter of fact, know­ing Warn­er as I do, it won't sur­prise me one bit if he him­self sent that record­ing to Lon­don.What else can I think?Af­ter lis­ten­ing care­ful­ly to what was said, un­less you are some­one with an in­sa­tiable dis­like for the nu­mero uno man of foot­ball in the re­gion, you can­not help but con­clude that the record­ing com­plete­ly ex­on­er­ates Warn­er of all bribery charges which FI­FA may have aimed at him.I didn't need some­one from Yale or Har­vard to con­vince me that Warn­er was im­plic­it in his con­tri­bu­tion that no one who was be­ing gift­ed at that meet­ing was ob­lig­at­ed to vote for Muham­mad Bin Ham­man, the man on whose be­half the meet­ing was be­ing held.He was clear on the rea­son why Bin Ham­man was giv­ing cash in­stead of the cul­tur­al­ly es­tab­lished prac­tise of FI­FA, where ex­or­bi­tant gifts are the norm.

He asked for noth­ing for him­self. In fact, nei­ther did he ask for any­thing for any mem­ber of the CFU. He sim­ply didn't ask. It was Bin Ham­mam who in­sist­ed that the pri­vate jet which he was us­ing to come to Trinidad could not ac­com­mo­date gifts for the 25 mem­bers of the CFU and opt­ed to make his con­tri­bu­tion in cash.Warn­er went to great lengths to ex­plain that Bin Ham­mam's gifts were not for per­son­al en­rich­ment but for use in the de­vel­op­ment of foot­ball in the var­i­ous ter­ri­to­ries and were not to be re­gard­ed as en­tice­ment to pro­cure mem­bers' votes as mem­bers were ex­pect­ed to vote ac­cord­ing to the dic­tates of their con­science.He then went to great lengths to ap­prise every­one present of all the facts, the pros and the cons.As head of the CFU, Warn­er had a re­spon­si­bil­i­ty to his mem­ber­ship to ex­press an un­der­stand­ing of the sit­u­a­tion as it re­lat­ed to their choic­es of Bin Ham­man or Sepp Blat­ter for pres­i­den­cy. And this he did, point­ing out that the heir ap­par­ent or the most like­ly man to suc­ceed Blat­ter in four years time was Michel Pla­ti­ni - a French­man.

Did they want to go back to Eu­rope? Or would some­one from an­oth­er part of the world with fresh ideas be their choice?I would think that those of us who be­lieve in democ­ra­cy would ap­plaud Warn­er's ini­tia­tive. As far as I am con­cerned he was seek­ing to gain every ad­van­tage for his own re­gion in as de­mo­c­ra­t­ic a way as one would wish.And who can blame him? I am still wait­ing to un­der­stand what part of the record­ing con­sti­tute a bribe. But like I said I am ham­strung by the lim­its placed on me by my fail­ure to at­tend Har­vard or Yale.All I can say is that in my very hum­ble view, FI­FA may have ini­ti­at­ed charges against Warn­er for bribery and they may very well have been valid, but if this is the record­ing that was meant to im­pli­cate him, I re­spect­ful­ly sub­mit that it would have tak­en a kan­ga­roo court to get a con­vic­tion.Not that FI­FA does not have kan­ga­roo courts but that's an­oth­er sto­ry!