Governing Bodies
Fraud case against ex-Ghana FA boss dropped after five years
A high court in Ghana has discharged Kwesi Nyantekyi, the former president of the country’s football association (GFA), after a complex five-year legal battle.
He was charged with conspiracy to commit fraud and corruption after being filmed taking money from a reporter during a sting investigation in 2018.
Alongside his Ghana Football Association role, Nyantekyi served as a vice-president of the Confederation of African Football (Caf) and was also a member of the Fifa council.
He was given a life ban by football’s world governing body for breaking bribery and corruption rules, but that sanction was later reduced to 15 years on appeal.
Nyantekyi pleaded not guilty to the charges that arose from the investigation, which sought to expose corruption in African football and was reported by BBC Africa Eye.
The case against him collapsed after Ghanaian state prosecutors failed to present any of their five potential witnesses, including undercover journalist Anas Aremeyaw Anas.
Anas had wanted to testify wearing a mask to protect his anonymity and because of security concerns.
Resignation after Number 12 documentary
Nyantakyi’s case stemmed from an investigative documentary titled ‘Number 12’.
Secretly recorded footage showed him receiving $65,000 (£51,500) cash from an undercover reporter pretending to be a businessman keen to invest in Ghanaian football.
He denied any wrongdoing, claiming the footage was doctored to incriminate him and that he had received a lesser amount in reimbursement of travel expenses.
Nyantakyi dismissed the investigation as “shoddy work with cut and paste” but later resigned from his positions at the GFA, Caf and Fifa before the latter banned him in October 2018.
He was the most prominent person among more than 100 football officials – most of them West African referees – who received cash during the Number 12 investigation.
Fifa rules forbid officials from receiving cash gifts.
Despite the documentary’s findings, the prosecution’s inability to secure testimony from their witnesses led to the decision of the high court in Accra to discharge Nyantakyi.
Delays after mask wrangle and murder
One major issue in the case was how Anas would appear in court as a witness.
In May 2023 an Accra High Court ruled that the undercover reporter could take to the stand wearing his trademark bead mask.
However, a Court of Appeal subsequently overturned that decision, insisting Anas should testify without the mask.
On Thursday, state prosecutors submitted a request for a one-month adjournment to work out their next move, but that was denied.
The five-year-long case was also delayed by the murder of Ahmed Hussein-Suale, an investigative journalist involved in the Number 12 documentary and a potential witness, by unidentified gunmen in January 2019.
Another charge against Nyantakye, for fraudulently using the name of former Ghanaian president Nana Akufo-Addo, has also been dropped.
-BBC
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The Republic of Congo said on Monday that it will hold discussions with world’s football governing body FIFA and the Confederation of African Football (CAF) to lift sanctions that bar its federation from international competitions.
FIFA, in consultation with Africa’s football governing body, on Friday suspended Congo due to third-party interference in the central African nation’s football affairs, which violates its obligations under FIFA’s rules. Congo denies this.
FIFA said the suspension would only be lifted if a number of conditions were met, including the return of full control of the federation’s headquarters and other facilities to the national football federation FECOFOOT.
Congo Sports Minister Hugues Ngouelondele told a press conference that authorities will “very quickly get in touch with the leaders of CAF and FIFA to discuss the lifting of the sanction”.
He added that while the government seeks a compromise, it would not compromise its principles.
The suspension came in the wake of internal disputes within Congo’s national football federation.
The performance of the country’s national football has been underwhelming in recent years, the minister said. It has failed to secure a place in the AFCON continental tournament since their last appearance in 2015.
Despite the troubles facing Congolese football, he dismissed claims of government interference in the federation’s matters. He also stressed that such challenges are not exclusive to Congo.
-Reuters
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FIFA has suspended the Congolese Football Federation (FECOFOOT) this Thursday. The suspension is till further notice. FIFA has already notified all its member associations
FIFA Statutes’ article 16 was cited as the reason. Congo’s team, known as the Red Devils are in the same World Cup qualifying group as Morocco, Tanzania, Zambia, Niger Republic and Eritrea.
Their next match is supposed to be an away duel with Tanzania. The match may not hold except the suspension is lifted before then. They lost their Group E World Cup qualifying match 6-0 at home to Morocco last June.
FECOFOOT loses all its membership rights, as defined in Article 13 of the statutes of the world body, with immediate effect and until further notice.
FECOFOOT representative teams and affiliated clubs can no longer take part in international competitions while the suspension is in force.
They are not qualified for the 2025 Afcon in Morocco and no Congolese club is involved in the quarter-finals of the CAF inter-club competitions this season.
According to FIFA, the decision was taken in consultation with CAF after two FIFA/CAF missions were dispatched to Brazzaville.
The lifting of the suspension will be subject to the following conditions:
- Returning full control of the FECOFOOT headquarters, the Ignié Technical Centre and the association’s other facilities to FECOFOOT;
- Desisting from any efforts to change the signatories of the FECOFOOT bank accounts and/or giving full control back to the signatories recognised by FIFA and CAF;
- Declaring invalid or setting aside any decisions, legal or otherwise, authorising the ad hoc committee to exercise any control or have any authority over FECOFOOT; and
- Ensuring full cooperation to allow FECOFOOT to manage its affairs without undue influence from third parties.
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United States’ President Donald Trump’s executive order restricting transgender women and girls from playing in female sports offers little guidance on enforcing the ban beyond looking into the “best practices” of those states with similar laws, which have mostly proven limited or impractical.
Current options for enforcing the ban range from looking at birth certificates, which can be altered, to inspecting the bodies of children, an alternative that most would find unpalatable at best. “Anti-trans school sports bans are difficult to enforce because they rely on sex testing and body policing for implementation and enforcement,” said Chris Mosier, a transgender athlete and founder of transathlete.com, a website on school policies related to transgender athletes.
The issue is one that sports associations, schools and states have wrestled with for decades, with so-called “naked parades” and gynecological exams used to confirm sex for some events in the 1960s, though those methods were later abandoned.
Of the 25 states that have laws resembling Trump’s new order, only 12 specify a procedure for determining a student’s sex. In most cases, it involves checking birth certificates, according to the Movement Advancement Project, a think tank that advocates for transgender rights.
Other states look to affidavits from parents, students or healthcare providers.
“An increased scrutiny on athletes’ bodies creates serious harm to all women and girls who are perceived as ‘more masculine’ due to being queer, intersex, or otherwise out of alignment with narrow, white-centric norms of femininity,” said Mosier.
In 2020, Idaho became the first state to pass a law prohibiting transgender women and girls from playing on female-designated sports teams, mandating that a student whose sex was in dispute would have to provide a health exam and consent form from a healthcare provider.
The healthcare provider could verify the student’s sex by relying on their genetic makeup, reproductive anatomy or naturally produced testosterone levels, according to the law, which has since been blocked by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
A transgender woman, Lindsay Hecox, sued to block the law after she would not qualify to join the female track team at Boise State University due to the tests for biological sex.
For at least some of those who support the president’s order, the message it sends is powerful and overdue, regardless of any issues over enforcement that may surface.
“The executive order … is important legally but also vital for the long-overdue message it sends to women and girls: your rights matter,” said Kristen Waggoner, CEO and president of Alliance Defending Freedom, which describes itself as a conservative Christian legal advocacy group. “For too long, our daughters have heard the opposite message from those in power.”
A SITUATION NOBODY WANTS
Cheryl Cooky, a professor at Purdue University, said that the Olympics previously relied on testosterone testing, a highly flawed method because of differences in how bodies use the hormone. Similar tests in universities and high schools would be inappropriate because they do not necessarily show athletic performance, she said.
“Are we going to test nine-year-olds for testosterone?” Cooky asked. “Are we going to make nine-year-old boys and girls undergo physical inspections? This raises a whole host of issues. High schools and colleges don’t have the resources that the Olympic committee might,” she added.
To enforce Trump’s ban, she said, schools may end up relying on reports from parents or other students who suspect athletes may not be biological girls because of how they look or even if a student is exceptionally athletic, typically considered a male attribute.
“This ban is going to implicate all girls and women regardless of whether or not they are trans or cis gender,” she said.
A West Virginia law banning transgender students from playing sports according to their gender identity also relies on birth certificates and physical exams.
The law, which is also currently blocked by a judge, was challenged after an 11-year-old transgender girl wanted to run track and cross-country on the female team in middle school.
Relying on student birth certificates can be difficult because transgender youth in many states have the ability to change the documents, said Elana Redfield, federal policy director at the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law.
One transgender boy who updated his birth certificate to display his sex as male later filed a federal discrimination lawsuit against his Florida school district for not allowing him to use the male restroom. Two federal courts ruled in his favor, but the appeals court reversed its decision in 2023 after a rehearing before a panel comprising all of its judges.
Without a more consistent enforcement mechanism, some authorities have floated the idea of inspecting the bodies of students to determine their assigned sex at birth, Redfield said.
“The concern is that you’re creating a situation where the school officials or some other entity would have to actually look at the physical bodies of children, which nobody wants,” she said.
-Reuters
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