Ramesh Ramd­han, the T&T Foot­ball As­so­ci­a­tion (TTFA) gen­er­al sec­re­tary, has sought to ver­i­fy why the ac­tions of the FI­FA to send a Nor­mal­i­sa­tion Com­mit­tee to gov­ern T&T foot­ball was done with­out mer­it or log­ic.

In a se­ries of let­ters to-and-from the world gov­ern­ing body ear­li­er this year, the for­mer World Cup ref­er­ee, on be­half of the em­bat­tled foot­ball ad­min­is­tra­tion, re­vealed on Fri­day that his ad­min­is­tra­tion had signed a Mem­o­ran­dum of Un­der­stand­ing (MOU) for a mul­ti-bil­lion dol­lar state-of-the-art foot­ball, res­i­den­tial and sport­ing fa­cil­i­ty that would have trans­formed the Ari­ma com­mu­ni­ty.

He said it would have been his ad­min­is­tra­tion’s debt-erad­i­ca­tion project. It was to be built on the un­der-utilised Ari­ma Velo­drome fa­cil­i­ty, sit­u­at­ed in the heart of the east­ern city.

Ac­cord­ing to Ramd­han, the fa­cil­i­ty was set to in­clude a sport­ing ground for lo­cal, re­gion­al and in­ter­na­tion­al match­es, a liv­ing quar­ters that would have been put out to the pub­lic for sale, and a busi­ness cen­tre, all of which he said was com­mu­ni­cat­ed to the FI­FA/CON­CA­CAF three-mem­ber team that con­duced a fi­nan­cial au­dit in Feb­ru­ary as part of their means to clear ex­ist­ing TTFA debt.

"They were told of the pur­pose of the fa­cil­i­ty and were even giv­en a copy of the agree­ment," Ramd­han not­ed.

The project was to be done by in­ter­na­tion­al ar­chi­tect firm Laven­der of the UK, a world renown com­pa­ny in ar­chi­tec­ture and the builders of the World Cup sta­di­um in Qatar.

Ramd­han, who was one of two TTFA of­fi­cials to have signed the MOU, said the project was be­ing done in col­lab­o­ra­tion with the Ari­ma Bor­ough Cor­po­ra­tion and work was sched­uled to be­gin lat­er this year.

"Of­fi­cial of the com­pa­ny- Laven­der, were ex­pect­ed to be in T&T on April 14 to hold talks with Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley and oth­er mem­bers of his gov­ern­ment, as well as of­fi­cials of the Ari­ma Bor­ough Cor­po­ra­tion. The TTFA was ex­pect­ed to ben­e­fit hand­some­ly from this project in terms of fi­nance and it would have been used to clear the ex­ist­ing $50 mil­lion debt of the TTFA."

Apart from its lo­ca­tion, the fa­cil­i­ty was set to al­low res­i­dents with the lux­u­ry of watch­ing in­ter­na­tion­al match­es from the com­fort of their homes on the up­per fourth floor, while al­so en­able them with the ease of con­duct­ing busi­ness by walk­ing two sto­ries be­low them, as was done in Qatar.

On Tues­day, FI­FA took a de­ci­sion to send a nor­mal­i­sa­tion com­mit­tee af­ter it felt the foot­ball as­so­ci­a­tion’s fi­nan­cial po­si­tion was near in­sol­ven­cy, al­though the TTFA tried to con­vinced FI­FA that they were set to wipe clean the debt through the Laven­der project. They (TTFA) al­so sought to show FI­FA that it would have put the coun­try’s foot­ball on sta­ble foot­ing.

Be­cause of FI­FA's de­ci­sion, the TTFA has since agreed to chal­lenge it through the Court of Ar­bi­tra­tion for Sports (CAS). It has al­so called on its mem­bers in the Caribbean Foot­ball Union (CFU) to sup­port them with a unit­ed voice that would re­ject in­jus­tice by the world gov­ern­ing body for foot­ball while show­ing the pow­er­ful con­tri­bu­tion it has in world foot­ball.

FI­FA, in a let­ter, writ­ten to TTFA on Jan­u­ary 13, said: "In light of the sig­nif­i­cant amount of out­stand­ing debt the T&T Foot­ball As­so­ci­a­tion has had in the past with third-par­ty sup­pli­ers, the FI­FA ad­min­is­tra­tion would like to fol­low up on the cur­rent sta­tus of those debts. It is im­por­tant to high­light that as­sets fi­nanced by the FI­FA For­ward Pro­gramme can­not be, un­der any cir­cum­stances, mort­gaged. The FI­FA Mem­ber As­so­ci­a­tions Di­vi­sion is ful­ly com­mit­ted and avail­able to sup­port your mem­ber as­so­ci­a­tion in every nec­es­sary as­pect in or­der to achieve a pos­i­tive out­come."

How­ev­er, in an im­me­di­ate re­sponse, Ramd­han said dur­ing a vis­it by the De­vel­op­ment Man­ag­er it was dis­cov­ered that funds in­tend­ed for oth­er ar­eas were used on the now con­tro­ver­sial Home of Foot­ball which re­sult­ed in the foot­ball as­so­ci­a­tion’s fail­ure to meet its day-to-day ex­pens­es, par­tic­u­lar­ly salaries for staff dur­ing the Christ­mas hol­i­days.

It stat­ed al­so that present­ly the out­stand­ing bal­ance owed in re­la­tion to the Home of Foot­ball is ap­prox­i­mate­ly $2 mil­lion, while the amount con­firmed in debt is $38,782, 826.31. It was ex­plained that oth­ers payable are $15,211,861.50, while to be de­ter­mined was a $25 mil­lion which rep­re­sents the Jack Warn­er which is be­fore the courts and the Shel­don Phillip mat­ter which was with­drawn by the TTFA fol­low­ing its elec­tion vic­to­ry on No­vem­ber 24.