Bangladesh Football Federation (BFF) officials have been accused of corruption for a long time. But many of those allegations have been proven true for the first time after FIFA banned the general secretary of the organization.
FIFA has published a detailed report on its website about how, in what manner and when FIFA committed this financial corruption. FIFA has published a detailed 51-page report on the matter on its website.
FIFA has published a detailed report on its website about how, in what manner and when FIFA committed this financial corruption. FIFA has published a detailed 51-page report on the matter on its website.
What’s in the report?
The report states that Abu Naim Sohag committed fraud and false information and embezzled and misappropriated BFF funds. He also breached FIFA’s Code of Ethics in the performance of his general duties and ethical responsibilities.
In which several allegations of fraud have been proven while showing the expenditure of money received from FIFA. And this financial fraud was easily noticed by FIFA’s investigation committee because Bafuf misspelled a few English words and mentioned some fake organizations in the documents submitted to FIFA.
According to the FIFA investigation report, in June 2020, FIFA invited tenders for the purchase of sports equipment worth around Tk 26 lakh.
Three companies that sell sports equipment submitted their tenders and one company was awarded the responsibility for supplying the equipment and in August of that year the company was also paid what they were owed, BFF claimed.
BFF, however, claimed that three firms had submitted tenders in the entire process. But FIFA’s investigation revealed that the three tenders were in fact written in the same style using different names and that the same organization was behind them.
And initially they suspected this because ‘quotation’ was misspelled in the same way in all the three tenders.
After that in 2019, BFF paid about 1.7 million taka to a travel agency to buy air tickets. Among the three travel agencies that submitted tenders for the service, one agency was given ticketing responsibility, BFF claimed.
Interestingly, the word ‘Rout’ was spelled incorrectly in all the three tenders. And the three tenders were written in the same style, on the same date and in the same font.
FIFA’s investigation later revealed that these tenders were actually fake and were created only to be submitted to FIFA.
A number of such fake paper issues of financial transactions have come up in the FIFA report. In some cases, they have also found evidence of money transactions based on handwritten papers. Fifa’s investigation revealed that financial transactions were even shown on the basis of white paper instead of invoices.
In addition to these, FIFA’s investigation report has revealed evidence of activities such as providing information on women buying footballs from clothing stores with the money given by FIFA, showing manpower exporters as travel agencies, and trying to cover up irregularities in financial transactions by creating fake companies year after year. .
The report of FIFA’s investigation committee has mentioned three irregularities in the management of forward funds received from FIFA.
These include withdrawing cash from FIFA designated accounts, contributing funds from other accounts to FIFA-related projects, and using FIFA funds outside of FIFA’s work.
FIFA also highlighted several examples of irregularities in Buff’s financial transactions in their report. According to the report, although FIFA forward program money is supposed to be paid through specific bank accounts, FIFA has used its own bank accounts for the FIFA program at various times.
It is estimated that in 2016, FIFA received more than 700,000 dollars as FIFA forward fund. But only 90 thousand dollars are spent according to the rules. In addition, there was no record of more than one hundred thousand dollars related to the salaries and foreign trips of female footballers that year.
From the money received from FIFA, FIFA gave a grant of about 100,000 dollars to the Bangladeshi clubs, which FIFA was not informed about. BFFdid not have any documents related to this transaction, but about $54,000 was paid in cash, which is outside of FIFA rules.
Besides, during the period 2017-2020, FIFA withdrew large amounts of cash from designated bank accounts of FIFA without any explanation.
According to the investigation committee’s report, the total financial transaction with BFF’s figures is about 6 lakh dollars, which is more than 6 crore rupees as per the current market.
FIFA’s investigation report has also attached the explanation of FIFA general secretary Abu Naim Sohag regarding irregularities related to financial transactions.
Statement of Abu Naim Sohag
Abu Naim Sohag said in this regard, Many times we did not get money from our sponsors on time but we had to organize the tournament on time. In such cases we are forced to take money from FIFA account.
Besides, we did not always get the full amount from the sponsors. Then we took money from other accounts and spent it as FIFA budget. That is, we have actually borrowed money from Fifa’s account.
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