CONCACAF president denies fee allegations

By Martyn Ziegler Special to PA SportsTicker

LONDON (Ticker)—CONCACAF president Jack Warner asked for the fee for an international friendly to be paid into his personal bank account, the former head of the Scottish Football Association alleged on Monday night.

John McBeth, who retired as Scottish FA president in May, told BBC TV’s Panorama program that Jack Warner asked for the fee for Trinidad and Tobago’s friendly match in Edinburgh in May 2004 to be paid directly to him.

Warner, a vice president of soccer’s world governing body, FIFA, insists the claims are “a patent lie”.

“There are one or two people on that (FIFA) executive committee that I wouldn’t trust as far as I could throw them,” McBeth said on the program. “Trinidad and Tobago came to play Scotland at Hibernian’s ground in Easter Road in Edinburgh. And after the game he asked me to make a check out to his personal account for the game.

“And I said ‘We don’t do that, it should go to the association’. I then found out later that he’d approached several other staff in my organization … to do exactly the same thing.”

McBeth and Warner have clashed in the past - McBeth was to be the four home nations’ British FIFA vice president but was dropped in May after he made comments implying African and Caribbean nations were tainted by corruption and greed.

Warner made an official complaint to FIFA saying the comments “smacked of racism”.

“I was talking about the football people that I’ve met and dealt with in Africa and the Caribbean,” McBeth told Panorama. “It was football people I was talking about. I wasn’t talking about the nation.

“I’m not a racist bigot and I think it probably says more about Jack and him trying to deflect away the criticism that I was making of corruption.”

Warner rejected the allegations. He told PA SportsTicker: “The statement is a patent lie issued by someone whom I got removed from the FIFA executive committee and whose memory has suddenly come to life.”