FKF president, Sam Nyamweya during the September AGM in Nairobi. PHOTO/JOE MIANO MUCHIRI
NAIROBI, November 24- Kenya is ranked among 87 members of FIFA global family or 42 percent of associations that scored zero points in Transparency International football governance league table report released on Tuesday.
The report says Football Kenya Federation (FKF) has no annual financial reports, organisational charter, annual activity reports and Code of Conduct available for public scrutiny either on their website or in response to emails sent to all 209 FAs that are members of FIFA.
According to the league table, between 2011 and 14; FIFA gave each of its 209 member associations some Sh209m and last year following the success of the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, a one-off payment of Sh107m.
“Each year FIFA hands out millions of dollars to FAs. The money is generated from two main sources: sponsors and broadcasters. They pay FIFA money because billions of fans follow football, watch it on TV, and buy football products such as balls and kits. It is the positive association with football that sponsors value and the global reach of the World Cup they pay for.
“The FAs generate additional revenues from local sponsorship deals, government grants and ticket sales,” the forward to the report states.
FKF present their accounts during their Annual General Meetings with respected firm, KPMG, recorded as their auditors.
In May, German TV, Deutsche Welle, accused federation president, Sam Nyamweya, who is seeking re-election for a second term at the elections planned for December of pocketing $USD500, 000 (Sh50m) in FIFA grants in a documentary titled “Soccer for Sale – Sepp Blatter and Allegations of Sleaze at FIFA.”
Jérôme J. Dufourg, a French football marketing executive who worked with FKF provided documents supporting claims that allegedly implicated Nyamweya who at the time in Zurich for the FIFA General Congress.
The money in question pertains to “development aid that FIFA generously provides for each association guaranteed by African votes for Blatter” the DW expose charged.
“I have documents from November 2011 to April and May 2013 and it’s clearly stating that Sam Nyamweya has stolen more than half a million dollars of funds coming from FIFA through the Financial Assistant Programme, bonuses from CAF assistant programmes and then from Government,” Dufourg alleged.
Publication of that story by Capital Sport was met with a demand letter threatening to sue the writer with Nyamweya strenuously denying Dufourg worked for his federation and all the claims he made about siphoning development money from FIFA and continental body CAF.
-Criminal Investigation-
“The corruption crisis at FIFA, world football’s governing body, has shown how badly the sport is run from the top. A lack of transparency and accountability allegedly led to what the United States Justice Department has called systemic corruption resulting in charges of money laundering, bribery and racketeering. The organisation is now the subject of criminal investigations in the US and Switzerland.
“This lack of transparency and accountability is unfortunately not limited to FIFA’s headquarters. FIFA does not systematically require transparency and accountability from its members, the national football associations (FAs) and the regional confederations. Any reform of FIFA will have to make that a priority,” the TI forward continued.
“Between 2011 and 2014 FIFA distributed a minimum of US$2.05 (Sh209,406,475) million to each of its 209 member football associations (FAs). This included a one-off payment in 2014 of US$1.05 (Sh107,256,975) million following the success of the World Cup. During that same period FIFA also gave US$102 million to the six regional football Confederations.
“FIFA says the money is for football development. But other than a partial accounting on the FIFA web site, there is no clear way to track what the FAs did with all that money,” the anti-corruption global watchdog reported.
In tracking how the huge grants by local standards were used, TI established 81 per cent of FAs have no financial records publicly available; 21 per cent of FAs have no websites and 85 per cent of FAs publish no activity accounts of what they do.
“We also sent emails to all 209 FAs asking them for links to the information because many websites are hard to navigate and the information hard to find. Only fourteen out of FIFA’s 209 football associations – Canada, Denmark, England, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Japan, Latvia, New Zealand, Northern Ireland, Norway, Portugal, the Republic of Ireland and Sweden – publish the minimum amount of information necessary to let people know what they do, how they spend their money and what values they believe in,” the report underlined.
“In some countries, national laws prescribe what football associations need to publish. These vary from country to country and many do not require significant public disclosure. Nevertheless, we believe that publishing this information is an important part of good governance,” TI added.
Kenya is one of the countries where disclosure is not restricted.
“The chart shows that 42 per cent (87) of FIFA’s member associations scored zero points. That means they do not publish any relevant information about their organisations.
“Forty-two FAs do not even have websites or websites that work.”
