Global anti-corruption watchdog, Transparency International (TI) has released a damning report, listing Football Association of Malawi (Fam) as among the world\u2019s least transparent and accountable football associations.<\/p>\n
However, Fam president, Walter Nyamilandu, during Saturday\u2019s presidential debate in Lilongwe insisted that his association is clean as its financial books are audited every year by reputable auditors.<\/p>\n
TI examined FA websites to find information on financial accounts, governing statutes, codes of conduct and annual activity reports and published the results in a mockingly titled report \u2014Transparency International Football Governance League Table\u2014 published on November 19, 2015 on the organisation\u2019s website.<\/p>\n
\u201cOnly 14 out of Fifa\u2019s 209 football associations\u2014 Canada, Denmark, England, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Japan, Latvia, New Zealand, Northern Ireland, Norway, Portugal, the Republic of Ireland and Sweden\u2014 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,\u201d reads the report\u2019s preamble.<\/p>\n
TI says this lack of openness is despite the fact that the FAs get over $1 million from Fifa.<\/p>\n
Fam was weighed and found wanting with its website conspicuously missing financial accounts, annual activity report, and code of conduct or ethics. The only readily available of the four things TI was looking for was organisational statutes or charter.<\/p>\n
A visit to Fam\u2019s website confirmed the report\u2019s findings.<\/p>\n
Fam can find solace in the fact that almost every African FA is on the dark part of the research, and in the TI\u2019s observation, Fifa might be partly to blame for not making the publication of this information mandatory.<\/p>\n
Fam presidential candidate in Saturday\u2019s elections, Wilkins Mijiga, on Tuesday said that with such type of unaccountability, the association cannot attract enough resources as donors and investors cannot trust the \u2018secretive\u2019 Fam leadership with their money.<\/p>\n
\u201c…the reason [why Fam cannot publish audited reports] is simple: no audit firm can publish Fam accounts because the accounts would be qualified and expose mismanagement,\u201d wrote Mijiga in a WhatsApp response.<\/p>\n
The other presidential contestant, Willy Yabwanya Phiri, also lamented the state of transparency at Fam.<\/p>\n
\u201cNo. We don\u2019t have any excuses\u2026 the incumbent [Fam president] told Malawians that Fam is being audited, but never mentioned why he often changes auditing companies\u2026 In all fairness, the current Fam administration has failed our soccer,\u201d wrote Yabwanya, also on WhatsApp.<\/p>\n
Fam general secretary, Suzgo Nyirenda, on Tuesday promised to respond to IP\u2019s report by yesterday noon, but he had not as we went to print.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, Fifa\u2019s acting secretary general, Markus Kattner, has highlighted \u201cmajor deficiencies\u201d in the way most FAs use Fifa\u2019s $350 million Financial Assistance Programme (FAP).<\/p>\n
Kattner, using a letter to Fifa members enclosing 2016 FAP application forms, noted that there are no \u201cspecial bank account maintained for Fifa development-related transfers, signatory powers not well defined (single signature instead of joint signature).\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cExpenses not documented sufficiently by third-party documents such as invoices, delivery vouchers, cash receipts, etc. Expense documents not readily available at the time of audit,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Global anti-corruption watchdog, Transparency International (TI) has released a damning report, listing Football Association of Malawi (Fam) as among the world\u2019s least transparent and accountable football associations. However, Fam president, Walter Nyamilandu, during Saturday\u2019s presidential debate in Lilongwe insisted that his association is clean as its financial books are audited every year by reputable auditors. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":13851,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13845","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13845","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13845"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13845\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13877,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13845\/revisions\/13877"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13851"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13845"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13845"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13845"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}