"Staff mem­bers of the T&T Foot­ball As­so­ci­a­tion will be paid, and so too the mem­bers of the na­tion­al foot­ball team cur­rent­ly set to take on Wales in an in­ter­na­tion­al friend­ly to­day," pres­i­dent of the T&TFA David John-Williams has said.

His com­ment comes amidst a re­port that the foot­ball as­so­ci­a­tion's ac­count was frozen re­cent­ly by a court or­der af­ter John-Williams failed to ho­n­our a rul­ing by the High Court in No­vem­ber of last year, to paid mem­bers of the Na­tion­al Fut­sal team monies owed for salaries, per diem, match fees and mis­cel­la­neous oth­er ex­pens­es that amount­ed to $475,743 plus le­gal fees of $69,200.82.

The mat­ter now lies square­ly in the hands of TTFA at­tor­ney An­nand Misir, as he goes full speed ahead with an ap­peal of the de­ci­sion.

John-Williams main­tained he and his as­so­ci­a­tion have had ab­solute­ly noth­ing to do with the agree­ment made be­tween the fut­sal coach Clay­ton Mor­ris and then TTFA pres­i­dent Ray­mond Tim Kee.

Yes­ter­day Guardian Me­dia Sports re­ceived a copy of the tran­script from the court which showed Mor­ris ad­mit­ting he was cho­sen by Tim Kee as part of a steer­ing com­mit­tee back in 2013 to pre­pare a na­tion­al team for the first time. The ap­point­ments were strict­ly ver­bal and did not have doc­u­men­ta­tion to show the John-Williams-led ad­min­is­tra­tion when they as­sumed of­fice back in No­vem­ber of 2015.

How­ev­er, Jus­tice Mar­garet Mo­hammed ap­peared to have ho­n­oured the agree­ment be­tween the par­ties and was par­tic­u­lar­ly an­noyed when the em­bat­tled foot­ball as­so­ci­a­tion pres­i­dent in­struct­ed his at­tor­ney to ap­peal the de­ci­sion, though he had ini­tial­ly asked for 28 days to make the pay­ment.

Jus­tice Mo­hammed's de­ci­sion to or­der the TTFA's bank- First Cit­i­zens to freeze its ac­count, was made last month. The bank was giv­en a date of April 4 to ap­pear in court with a state­ment of the TTFA's ac­count.

John-Williams in a re­lease yes­ter­day said his as­so­ci­a­tion just does not have the funds to pay the debt.

" Un­for­tu­nate­ly the fund­ing is just not there at this time to ser­vice these debts, but we at the TTFA con­tin­ue to sol­dier on, hence the rea­son for em­pha­sis on com­plet­ing the Ho­tel and the Home of Foot­ball which will be a ma­jor in­come gen­er­a­tion project not just for foot­ball but will change the face of sport in Trinidad and To­ba­go."

He not­ed the TTFA has been in a sim­i­lar sit­u­a­tion be­fore, par­tic­u­lar­ly when Graph­ic Ad­ver­tis­ing was suc­cess­ful in get­ting their ac­count frozen two years ago. Ac­cord­ing to the TTFA state­ment "Doc­u­ments on the ac­tion tak­en by per­sons who have ap­proached the court to have in­struc­tions is­sued to freeze the bank ac­counts of the TTFA last Fri­day was re­ceived on Mon­day, March 18th 2019. We at the TTFA have in­her­it­ed a debt of over 30 mil­lion dol­lars in­curred by the pre­vi­ous ad­min­is­tra­tions and con­tin­ue the up­hill task of ad­dress­ing that fi­nan­cial sit­u­a­tion, while al­so ad­dress­ing the on­go­ing op­er­at­ing re­quire­ments of the As­so­ci­a­tion."

It added "The facts are that while these are not debts cre­at­ed by the David John Williams Ad­min­is­tra­tion, they re­main the debt of the TTFA. We are very mind­ful of those whose sole agen­da is to de­stroy T&T Foot­ball by their ac­tions, but un­der no cir­cum­stances shall they de­rive such a re­sult."