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FIFA lifts ban on Pakistan Football Federation

The same guy has been head of PFF since Mush era... Faisal Saleh Hayat. With zero improvement in Pakistan football, infact severe regression. Bohat maal bunaya hoga isne
 
The news itself is good but I don't think anything will change.Our football team will not play regularly and the infrastructure will remain the same.
 
KARACHI: The suspension has been lifted, the funding is resuming and the Pakistan Football Federation (PFF) will also get its allocation of the 2018 FIFA World Cup tickets.

However the status of the PFF remains unclear and therefore global football body FIFA will send a mission to Pakistan to decide the further course of action.

A day after FIFA lifted the ban on the country, a FIFA spokesperson told Dawn that “a mission will visit Pakistan in the near future to assess the situation and decide on next steps”.

Even with the ban having been lifted, uncertainty prevails since the two-year term given to PFF president Faisal Saleh Hayat in September 2015 by FIFA has expired.

In its statement announcing the lifting of the suspension, FIFA said it “continues to closely follow the situation of the PFF”.

The ban was imposed in October last year after FIFA said the presence of a court-appointed administrator handling the PFF affairs was a contravention of its statutes which prohibit outside influence on the independence of their member associations.

The administrator was appointed by the Lahore High Court (LHC) in August 2015 after a dispute erupted in the PFF in the lead-up to its presidential elections in June that year.

Last month, the LHC validated Hayat’s election as president but the state of the PFF body remains confusing because the honourable court also upheld an election of Hayat’s rival faction in the provincial Punjab Football Association (PFA). Hayat claims the PFA president is from his own faction.

The case has now been moved to the Supreme Court and with the dispute not entirely resolved, the FIFA mission might recommend the installation of a normalisation committee.

FIFA had also sent a mission to Pakistan in August 2015 and Hayat’s body had complained to the Asian Football Confederation (AFC) that it was “utterly disappointed” with its conduct.

Reliable sources have told Dawn that the mission wasn’t satisfied with the way Hayat’s body had conducted the presidential election and it was only thanks to AFC’s persistence that FIFA gave Hayat’s faction a two-year mandate to ratify its statutes and conduct fresh elections.

While FIFA had stopped PFF’s funding back in October 2016, Dawn revealed that the AFC only stopped funding the PFF after the ban was imposed.

With the lifting of the suspension, however, PFF is now eligible to receive funding and is set to receive a bumper $4million thanks to FIFA’s new Forward Football Development Programme.

It will also receive its allocation of World Cup tickets for this year’s edition in Russia. Dawn has revealed how the PFF sold tickets for the 2014 World Cup tickets at inflated prices.

Moreover, the PFF will also now be able to vote for the 2026 World Cup host during the 2018 FIFA Congress on June 13 in Moscow, where Morocco is competing against a North American bid by the United States, Canada and Mexico.

https://www.dawn.com/news/1395514/after-lifting-suspension-fifa-to-send-mission-to-pakistan
 
KARACHI: Another international window and once again Pakistan’s national football team will be missing in action.

In the past, the Pakistan Football Federation (PFF) often cited financial hurdles in arranging friendly matches for the national team. They didn’t have to arrange matches for the latest window that opened on Monday and runs until next Wednesday with Pakistan slated to feature in the qualifiers for the 2020 AFC Under-23 Championship.

Instead, the Pakistan Football Federation (PFF) recognised by global football body FIFA withdrew the team from the qualifiers in Tajikistan where they were due to face the hosts, Uzbekistan and arch-rivals India, meaning Pakistan went out of the race for the 2020 Olympics without even kicking a ball. The AFC Under-23 Championship in Thailand next year was to act as Asian qualifiers for the Olympic in Tokyo.

That withdrawal was the latest in a string of pull-outs by the PFF of Faisal Saleh Hayat, which isn’t recognised domestically after the Supreme Court ordered fresh elections of the country’s football governing body that saw Syed Ashfaq Hussain Shah elected as Pakistan’s football chief.

The election did bring to a close a long-running legal wrangle that has afflicted Pakistan football since the last four years. With that chapter coming to a close, FIFA will now decide how to proceed further having earlier called the election as “third-party interference” in the affairs of its member associations.

The PFF issue will be discussed by FIFA’s Member Associations Committee for the first time since that election when it meets early next month. “The FIFA Member Associations Committee is scheduled for 3 April 2019 and the situation of the PFF will be on the agenda,” a FIFA spokesperson told Dawn on Monday.

Dawn understands that the Committee has reached out to the PFF of Hayat for further details after the Supreme Court last week dismissed a review petition against the elections filed by Hayat.

Hayat, Balochistan Football Association (BFA) president Rauf Notezai and former PFF Women’s Wing chairperson Rubina Irfan were the petitioners with the Supreme Court last Wednesday declaring the review petitions as an attack on the elections.

The Pakistan issue would’ve been discussed earlier had the FIFA Member Associations committee met last month. According to the FIFA calendar, its standing committees were due to meet from February 11 to March 4 but those meetings did not take place.

In October last year, FIFA’s Member Associations committee had given the Hayat-led PFF an 18-month period — until March 2020 — to hold fresh elections.

After a controversial PFF election in June 2015, that sparked a dispute in the football body, FIFA had given Hayat a two-year mandate to ratify the PFF statutes and hold fresh elections.

The PFF was banned for six months for “third-party intervention” before FIFA lifted the suspension in March last year after Hayat was restored as the PFF chief on the orders of the Lahore High Court, which had appointed an administrator to oversee PFF affairs in 2015. The case went to the Supreme Court the very next month with the country’s apex court ordering fresh elections.

Ahead of the election, FIFA had warned that the PFF faces possible suspension. If the Members Association Committee proposes a ban, it will be ratified at the next FIFA Council meeting scheduled for June 3 in Paris, two days before the FIFA Congress to be held in the French capital. Dawn understands however that there is a strong chance that the committee would decide to send a fact-finding mission to the country.

Since the Ashfaq-led body came into power, the Hayat-led PFF has terminated the services of almost all of its employees. The approval of the termination of services, signed by Hayat and his general secretary retired Col Ahmed Yar Khan Lodhi and seen by Dawn, has the PFF disbursing an amount of Rs2,849,400 amongst its 18 employees.

The PFF also returned funding worth $530,000 to both FIFA and AFC, who have suspended development funding due to the current situation.

Last week, Ashfaq was named as an ex-officio member on the Senate Committee for promotion and development of football in the country. The committee is led by Senate Chairman Mohammad Sadiq Sanjrani.

Not recognised by FIFA or the AFC, Ashfaq remains powerless as Pakistan miss out on playing in yet another international window.

https://www.dawn.com/news/1470633/fifa-committee-to-discuss-pff-situation-early-next-month
 
KARACHI: The wait is over. And with it, there is genuine hope that Pakistan football’s long-running problems will be over too.

Global football body FIFA on Friday announced the Normalisation Committee for the Pakistan Football Federation (PFF), naming Humza Khan as its chairman, four years after a controversial election threw football in the country into an unprecedented crisis.

The main job for the Humza-led Normalisation Committee will be to hold fresh elections of the PFF by 15 June 2020 — after which the mandate of his body will expire.

“It’s a massive responsibility,” Humza, a former captain of Karachi United FC, told Dawn after the announcement was made via a news release on the FIFA website. “Being a footballer, and having played for Karachi United at a very high level, at times there was disillusionment because football wasn’t flourishing in the country.

“FIFA has given me a chance to do something for the game in the country and I’ll try to do my best,” added the 40-year-old investment banker who will have former PFF general secretary retired Col Mujahidullah Tareen, Sikander Khattak, Munir Ahmed Khan Sadhana and Syed Hasan Najib Shah as members on the committee.

“I haven’t met any of the members,” he said. “I’ll be meeting with them for the first time although FIFA did brief me about their conversations with the selected candidates.”

Some 17 candidates were interviewed by FIFA for the four member slots, their nominations given by the two warring factions of the PFF, which emerged following its disputed elections of 2015.

Since then, football has been in turmoil in the country and it took FIFA until June this year to finally announce that it was going to establish a Normalisation Committee, which in addition to holding fresh elections will also be responsible for running the day-to-day affairs of the PFF.

That decision also meant FIFA had to backtrack on an earlier mandate it had given to the Faisal Saleh Hayat-led PFF until March 2020 to ratify the PFF statutes and hold fresh elections.

Hayat, PFF president since 2003, isn’t however recognised domestically as Pakistan’s football chief. That title belongs to Syed Ashfaq Hussain Shah who was elected as PFF president in an election held on the orders of the Supreme Court in December last year. That election came at the culmination of a nearly four-year legal battle over the control of Pakistan’s football but wasn’t accepted by FIFA.

Col Mujahid and Sikander were amongst the seven persons nominated by the Ashfaq-led group while Munir and Hasan were nominated by Hayat.

“The process to select the Normalisation Committee members for the PFF has been implemented following the standard procedures that are applied for such processes,” a FIFA spokesperson told Dawn on Tuesday, following resentment from some quarters over some of their nominated candidates being rejected.

Munir is a lawyer from Jhang, Hayat’s hometown, while Sikander, an engineer, hails from Ashfaq’s hometown of Peshawar.

Col Mujahid, meanwhile, worked in the PFF as its general secretary and its technical director before leaving the federation in 2006 as he didn’t see eye-to-eye with Hayat.

“It’s an honour for me that FIFA has given me this huge opportunity,” the former Pakistan captain told Dawn on Friday. “It was now or never really. If the normalisation committee — and the right normalisation committee — hadn’t come now, Pakistan football would’ve remained in doldrums.“During the interview, I told the FIFA officials that twice in the past, in 1989 and 1994, they had appointed normalisation committees and there had been little change. Thankfully this time FIFA has realised that the problem starts from the grassroot level and that club scrutiny was required to hold free and fair elections.”

FIFA said the “normalisation committee members will assume their duties with immediate effect” and they will have to pass an eligibility check.

“The PFF normalisation committee will act as an electoral committee whose decisions are final and binding,” FIFA added. “As such, none of its members will be eligible for any of the open positions in the elections under any circumstances, including in the event that their mandate as a member of the PFF normalisation committee has been revoked or that they resign from their position.

“The specified period of time during which the PFF normalisation committee will perform its functions will expire as soon as it has fulfilled all of its tasks, but no later than nine months after its members have been officially appointed by FIFA – which means on 15 June 2020.

“The premises and bank accounts of the PFF are to be handed over to the PFF normalisation committee by no later than 20 September 2019.”

With the most important decision taken by FIFA, the process to put the PFF house in order begins now. The normalisation committee now faces a race against time to first conduct the scrutiny of clubs before drafting the electoral code with FIFA and the Asian Football Confed*eration (AFC) and finally hold elections from the districts all the way up to the PFF presidential polls.

“It’s a clear mandate,” said Humza. “The most important, the most challenging job is to hold the election. It depends on multiple factors whether we will be able to do all this in nine months but we will give it our best.”

https://www.dawn.com/news/1505057/the-wait-is-over-fifa-announces-normalisation-committee-for-pff
 
MenInG said:
KARACHI: The wait is over. And with it, there is genuine hope that Pakistan football’s long-running problems will be over too.

Global football body FIFA on Friday announced the Normalisation Committee for the Pakistan Football Federation (PFF), naming Humza Khan as its chairman, four years after a controversial election threw football in the country into an unprecedented crisis.

The main job for the Humza-led Normalisation Committee will be to hold fresh elections of the PFF by 15 June 2020 — after which the mandate of his body will expire.

“It’s a massive responsibility,” Humza, a former captain of Karachi United FC, told Dawn after the announcement was made via a news release on the FIFA website. “Being a footballer, and having played for Karachi United at a very high level, at times there was disillusionment because football wasn’t flourishing in the country.

“FIFA has given me a chance to do something for the game in the country and I’ll try to do my best,” added the 40-year-old investment banker who will have former PFF general secretary retired Col Mujahidullah Tareen, Sikander Khattak, Munir Ahmed Khan Sadhana and Syed Hasan Najib Shah as members on the committee.

“I haven’t met any of the members,” he said. “I’ll be meeting with them for the first time although FIFA did brief me about their conversations with the selected candidates.”

Some 17 candidates were interviewed by FIFA for the four member slots, their nominations given by the two warring factions of the PFF, which emerged following its disputed elections of 2015.

Since then, football has been in turmoil in the country and it took FIFA until June this year to finally announce that it was going to establish a Normalisation Committee, which in addition to holding fresh elections will also be responsible for running the day-to-day affairs of the PFF.

That decision also meant FIFA had to backtrack on an earlier mandate it had given to the Faisal Saleh Hayat-led PFF until March 2020 to ratify the PFF statutes and hold fresh elections.

Hayat, PFF president since 2003, isn’t however recognised domestically as Pakistan’s football chief. That title belongs to Syed Ashfaq Hussain Shah who was elected as PFF president in an election held on the orders of the Supreme Court in December last year. That election came at the culmination of a nearly four-year legal battle over the control of Pakistan’s football but wasn’t accepted by FIFA.

Col Mujahid and Sikander were amongst the seven persons nominated by the Ashfaq-led group while Munir and Hasan were nominated by Hayat.

“The process to select the Normalisation Committee members for the PFF has been implemented following the standard procedures that are applied for such processes,” a FIFA spokesperson told Dawn on Tuesday, following resentment from some quarters over some of their nominated candidates being rejected.

Munir is a lawyer from Jhang, Hayat’s hometown, while Sikander, an engineer, hails from Ashfaq’s hometown of Peshawar.

Col Mujahid, meanwhile, worked in the PFF as its general secretary and its technical director before leaving the federation in 2006 as he didn’t see eye-to-eye with Hayat.

“It’s an honour for me that FIFA has given me this huge opportunity,” the former Pakistan captain told Dawn on Friday. “It was now or never really. If the normalisation committee — and the right normalisation committee — hadn’t come now, Pakistan football would’ve remained in doldrums.“During the interview, I told the FIFA officials that twice in the past, in 1989 and 1994, they had appointed normalisation committees and there had been little change. Thankfully this time FIFA has realised that the problem starts from the grassroot level and that club scrutiny was required to hold free and fair elections.”

FIFA said the “normalisation committee members will assume their duties with immediate effect” and they will have to pass an eligibility check.

“The PFF normalisation committee will act as an electoral committee whose decisions are final and binding,” FIFA added. “As such, none of its members will be eligible for any of the open positions in the elections under any circumstances, including in the event that their mandate as a member of the PFF normalisation committee has been revoked or that they resign from their position.

“The specified period of time during which the PFF normalisation committee will perform its functions will expire as soon as it has fulfilled all of its tasks, but no later than nine months after its members have been officially appointed by FIFA – which means on 15 June 2020.

“The premises and bank accounts of the PFF are to be handed over to the PFF normalisation committee by no later than 20 September 2019.”

With the most important decision taken by FIFA, the process to put the PFF house in order begins now. The normalisation committee now faces a race against time to first conduct the scrutiny of clubs before drafting the electoral code with FIFA and the Asian Football Confed*eration (AFC) and finally hold elections from the districts all the way up to the PFF presidential polls.

“It’s a clear mandate,” said Humza. “The most important, the most challenging job is to hold the election. It depends on multiple factors whether we will be able to do all this in nine months but we will give it our best.”

https://www.dawn.com/news/1505057/the-wait-is-over-fifa-announces-normalisation-committee-for-pff
Click to expand...

Good news
 
Good to see a former player from an organized club like Karachi United steer the ship back on course.
 
KARACHI: Alexandre Gros stopped short of admitting FIFA should’ve appointed a Normalisation Committee for the Pakistan Football Federation (PFF) four years ago. But he did say that with the appointment of a Normalisation Committee led by Humza Khan, the global football body was committed to doing its best for the game in Pakistan.

Speaking to selected media including Dawn here on Tuesday, the senior governance services manager of FIFA’s Member Associations Committee also threw his weight behind Humza as the Normalisation Committee chairman and bring Pakistan football out of its recent crisis-plagued years.

“We wanted to act for quite some time but the trigger point for FIFA to decide it was high time to appoint the Normalisation Committee was when we saw that the Pakistan national team facing difficulty in participating in the first round of the 2022 FIFA World Cup qualifier,” Gros said. “Both factions had set up their own training camps and that was a bit too much, although I must admit the situation had been the same for a long time.”

The announcement to appoint the committee came in June and FIFA revealed the composition of the committee last week with Gros admitting that forming the body, which will run the daily affairs of the PFF and hold fresh elections in nine months’ time, was a tough task.

“Pakistan was very tricky,” he said, drawing on his experience of working in several other countries. “It was very complicated. There were deep divisions in Pakistan football. And if we didn’t act now, this vicious cycle would’ve continued. FIFA is trying to do its best for Pakistan football. This is a country of about 220 million and yet it’s languishing at 204th in the FIFA rankings. We want the sport to grow in Pakistan.”

The PFF broke into two factions following a controversial election held by then-incumbent president Faisal Saleh Hayat in June 2015. It saw the matter go to both FIFA and the Supreme Court. While FIFA continued to back Hayat, the SC, at the culmination of a long, drawn-out legal battle, announced fresh elections that saw Syed Ashfaq Hussain Shah elected as PFF chief last year.

FIFA did not accept Ashfaq’s election but it did ask him and Hayat to send nominations for the four posts of members in the committee. Eventually two from each group, retired Col Mujahidullah Tareen and Sikander Khattak from Ashfaq’s and Munir Ahmed Khan Sadhana and Syed Hasan Najib Shah from Hayat’s were named. Gros, however, clarified that the appointment of Humza came from FIFA itself.

“No one recommended Humza,” said Gros. “Earlier we tried to take input from both parties for the post of chairman and tried to mediate. But there is a lot of distrust and antagonism. The conflict is permanent so we took it upon ourselves to select.”

Since Humza’s appointment, officials of the Hayat group have questioned his neutrality, citing that since he was part of Karachi United, he would share the same views as that of the club’s founder Taha Alizai who has been a legal representative for the Ashfaq faction.

Gros rubbished those views. “I know there will be people trying to question the impartiality of the chairman ... it’s part of the game here to try and derail the process,” he said. “We know Humza played for Karachi United and that he and Taha played together but that doesn’t represent common political thinking. We are very sure that he doesn’t work for either side.”

Humza, sitting next to Gros, added: “If you have played football together, it doesn’t mean you share the same views. Karachi United isn’t all about Taha. There are many people there who have their own individual views.”

The Hayat faction has also protested the presence of Col Mujahid on the committee. But Gros rejected the notion that the former PFF secretary general wasn’t the right choice. “It was the easiest selection for us … Col Mujahid is an encyclopedia on Pakistan football and a football man through and through. His qualities far outweigh what’s being said about him,” he said about the former Pakistan captain.

Gros seemed less convinced about the other three members. Sikander is a close friend of Ashfaq while Sadhana is a personal lawyer of Hayat and Najib is the vice-chairman of Imperial Builders and Developers in Sri Lanka which reportedly has business ties with Hayat’s company Gulf Imperial in the United Arab Emirates.

While asking both parties for candidates for the Normalisation Committee, FIFA asked them for individuals who were “neutral or external to recent disputes in Pakistani football” and had “no material or familial relationship with any member of either party in the disputes or with any member of the PFF administration”.

“It’s our job to outline the characterestics,” Gros said. “If a person chooses profiles without that criterion, it’s their prerogative. There will be an eligibility check on the members from the FIFA governance committee.”

Gros however added that a “close friend” like Sikander doesn’t represent a conflict of interest while adding that Sadhana, who is also a member of the Punjab Football Association (PFA), provided the committee with “legal expertise”. He added that Najib had committed to coming to Pakistan to work with the committee and said they hadn’t checked yet if Najib potentially shared any family ties with Hayat.

“The committee was formed after a painful process,” said Humza. “Question around familial, material relationship is subjective but if it hampers the working of the committee, those people will be changed.”

Gros reiterated that in many cases around the world, “members are changed and at times the whole committee has been changed” but said he was generally happy at the reaction that the committee has received. “If both parties aren’t happy with the decision taken, it means I’ve done my job well,” he said.

The Normalisation Committee will meet for the first time on Wednesday and a huge question mark remains over the fate of the PFF secretariat. Hayat’s long-serving secretary retired Col Ahmed Yar Khan Lodhi was on Tuesday in Kuala Lumpur to attend the executive committee meeting of the South Asian Football Federation (SAFF) where they decided to shift the 2020 edition of the SAFF Championship from Pakistan to Bangladesh.

With the Normalisation Committee having already been announced, Humza wasn’t consulted before the decision was made. Gros said that while the decision to shift the tournament was “unfortunate for Pakistan”, Humza “had the powers of the PFF chief and could ask SAFF to reconsider”.

Humza was asked whether removing Col Lodhi it would give his detractors more ammunition against him to which he gave a very straightforward response. “The nature of my job will be to take decisions,” he said. “Tough decisions are part of my job and criticism comes with the mandate.”

With FIFA and the Asian Football Confederation (AFC) giving operational funds to the Normalisation Committee, Humza was confident that football activities will soon resume in the country.

But the most arduous and most important task for the committee is the race against time they face in conducting scrutiny of the clubs across the country, drafting an electoral code for the elections and conduct polls from districts all the way up to the PFF executive committee by June next year.

“The scrutiny is going to be a long process and when you consider that, nine months seems a very ambitious timeframe,” said Gros. “It happens from time to time that mandates of Normalisation Committees are extended. But our objective remains to conduct the election by June.”

After that, and after the recent years of turmoil, Pakistan football can hopefully look forward to a new era of development and footballing excellence.

https://www.dawn.com/news/1505756/normalisation-committee-was-the-need-of-the-hour-fifa-official
 
LAHORE: The FIFA-appointed Normalisation Committee for the Pakistan Football Federation (PFF) got its working space on Friday.

The PFF faction led by Syed Ashfaq Hussain Shah handed over charge of the PFF House to the Normalisation Committee chairman Humza Khan at a small ceremony, entrusting the committee to work for the growth and betterment of football in the country.

Since being named chairman two weeks ago, this is a step forward for Humza as he seizes total control of football in Pakistan ahead of a nine-month mandate in which his committee has to hold elections all the way from the districts to the PFF executive committee.

Yet he’s only halfway through with the accounts held by the other faction led by Faisal Saleh Hayat yet to be handed over to him.

Hayat was recognised as Pakistan’s football chief by global football body FIFA while Ashfaq was elected as PFF president in an election held under the orders of the Supreme Court in December last year with Pakistan football having been in turmoil since 2015.

The funding by FIFA and the Asian Football Confederation (AFC) comes into accounts controlled by the Hayat faction and the Normalisation Committee’s operational funding will also come in that account.

Handing charge to Humza, Ashfaq declared his body received an amount of Rs170.50 million when he took charge of the PFF headquarters in January.

“Now we are handing over a bank balances of around Rs150.50 million to the Normalisation Committee with the hope it will work within its given mandate to complete the task of the elections in next nine months time,” Ashfaq said at a news conference.

Ashfaq said a major portion of that funding had been fixed in a bank account and he guarded every penny honestly, adding the spent amount was used on holding the first Inter-city Football Championship, Challenge Cup and some coaching courses.

He claimed neither the president nor any vice-presidents of his group charged any allowances from the PFF funds.

Asked if his group now had realised that FIFA was the sole authority to control the PFF, Ashfaq said his group welcomed the arrival of the Normalisation Committee since it wanted a swift resolution of the issue.

“For the sake of the footballers, the Congress and General Body took this decision to welcome the Normalisation Committee appointed by FIFA. Though we can hold tournaments at domestic level, without FIFA we can’t send our footballers abroad, so, we decided to accept the normalisation committee,” he said.

Ashfaq’s vice-presidents Malik Mohammad Aamir Dogar and Syed Zahir Ali Shah echoed his views and hoped that this committee would do justice for footballers who had suffered badly in past years. Another vice-president Sardar Naveed Haider Khan was quoted as saying in a news release that FIFA now has enough material about officials who had been damaging football in Pakistan and justice will be served sooner or later.

Ashfaq questioned the Hayat faction why it was showing reluctance to the Normalisation Committee. “Hayat has been very vocal about FIFA but why is he not accepting the Normalisation Committee.”

Hayat had written to FIFA after the Normalisation Committee was appoin*ted, saying he had reservations over Humza being its chairman. However, FIFA rejected those complaints.

Since taking charge, the Normalisation Committee removed Hayat’s long-serving secretary general retired Col Ahmed Yar Khan Lodhi, replacing him on an interim basis with retired Col Mujahidullah Tareen, who is a member of the committee.

On Friday, Mujahid announced that the PFF will be holding three-day trials in Layyah from October 4, to select the national team for the AFC Under-19 Championship qualifiers. The qualifiers will be played in Iraq from November 2 with Nasir Ismail named the head coach for the team.

https://www.dawn.com/news/1507731/normalisation-committee-gets-control-of-pff-headquarters
 
FIFA Council ratifies decision to appoint Normalisation Committee for PFF

KARACHI: The protests and the letters didn’t count for much in the end.

Faisal Saleh Hayat and his supporters have been vehemently protesting the appointment of the Normalisation Committee for the Pakistan Football Federation (PFF) since its officials were named by global football body FIFA last month.

But the decision to appoint the Normalisation Committee due to the crisis in the PFF, which was taken by the all-powerful, seven-member Bureau of the FIFA Council, has now been ratified by the FIFA Council — the decision-making arm of the game’s governing body.

The FIFA Council met on Shanghai on Thursday and one of the items on its agenda was the ‘Ratification of the decision of the Bureau of the FIFA Council in 27 June 2019 regarding the situation of the Pakistan Football Federation’.

“The decision of the Bureau of the Council was ratified by the FIFA Council during its meeting in Shanghai,” a FIFA spokesperson told Dawn on Thursday.

Earlier this month, FIFA stated that it “fully supported” the Normalisation Committee and the officials who had been appointed. The supporters of Hayat, the recently-deposed PFF chief, have been protesting against committee chairman Humza Khan and one of its members, retired Col. Mujahidullah Tareen.

Shameful scenes were witnessed at the protests with effigies burnt and Alexandre Gros, the FIFA official who oversaw the appointment of the Normalisation Committee, was also targeted.

Furthermore, two members of the Normalisation Committee who were nominated by Hayat — Munir Ahmed Khan Sadhana and Syed Hasan Najib Shah wrote letters to both the presidents and general secretaries of FIFA and the Asian Football Confederation (AFC).

In those letters, seen by Dawn, they called the Normalisation Committee a “non-starter right from the beginning” with the appointments of Humza and Mujahid, who they termed “highly controversial persons”, accusing them of supporting Hayat’s rival faction led by Ashfaq Hussain Shah.

Ashfaq nominated Mujahid and the fourth and final member of the Normalisation Committee, Sikander Khattak.

Dawn has seen that the letters by Munir and Najib were also sent to members of the FIFA Council as well as officials of FIFA’s member associations across the world in what seems to be a last-ditch effort from the Hayat group to change the formation of the Normalisation Committee.

Dawn has also seen emails sent out by Asghar Khan Anjum, the Pakistan football team’s manager during Hayat’s tenure, in which he has sent photographs and videos of the protests against the Normalisation Committee to the FIFA president and the members of its council.

“Concerning the letters: FIFA has no comment,” the FIFA spokesperson said.

Hayat, who became PFF chief in 2003, has clung onto power thanks to unflinching support over the years from both FIFA and the AFC, of which he is a vice-president. However, his protests against FIFA’s decision to appoint a Normalisation Committee, which he called “controversial, biased, and agenda-driven” show that he’s losing that support.

FIFA has said previously that it had “full trust in the process and work developed since the decision of the Bureau of the FIFA Council to establish a Normalisation Committee for the PFF and will continue to work together with AFC [Asian Football Confederation] towards bringing Pakistani football back on track and see it thriving in the country.”

https://www.dawn.com/news/1512718/f...on-to-appoint-normalisation-committee-for-pff
 
Hayat has been in charge for 16 years and during a period where football could have possibly formed a reasonable space in pakistan, he has stuck around like the incompetent fool he is. But why?

why stick around and at the same time not do anything for pakistani football? what does he get from this?
He should be investigated and put behind bars as I suspect he wouldnt be sitting here unless he was making money from somewhere. Also shows how corrupt FIFA is too..
 
the Great Khan said:
Hayat has been in charge for 16 years and during a period where football could have possibly formed a reasonable space in pakistan, he has stuck around like the incompetent fool he is. But why?

why stick around and at the same time not do anything for pakistani football? what does he get from this?
He should be investigated and put behind bars as I suspect he wouldnt be sitting here unless he was making money from somewhere. Also shows how corrupt FIFA is too..
Click to expand...

He is on good terms with Imran Khan so he will not be investigated and will continue to escape accountability. This Tabdeeli and Naya Pakistan drama continues to be selective and has not been extended to PFF yet.
 
Mamoon said:
He is on good terms with Imran Khan so he will not be investigated and will continue to escape accountability. This Tabdeeli and Naya Pakistan drama continues to be selective and has not been extended to PFF yet.
Click to expand...

You have any proof of that or you are just barking as usual?
 
FIFA-AFC delegation due in Pakistan next week to sort out PFF funding

KARACHI: A joint delegation of global football body FIFA and the Asian Football Confederation is visiting Pakistan next week for dialogue over the resumption of funding to the Pakistan Football Federation (PFF) Normalisation Committee by both bodies, Dawn can exclusively reveal.

Both FIFA and the AFC had suspended funding to the PFF in January following an election of the country’s football governing body held on the orders of the Supreme Court, at the end of a nearly four-year long legal battle sparked by a controversial election held by then FIFA-recognised PFF chief Faisal Saleh Hayat.

FIFA, which doesn’t accept interference into the matters of its member associations, did not accept the Supreme Court-ordered election that saw Ashfaq Hussain Shah elected PFF president and at that time the Hayat-led group had returned an amount of US$530,000 of unused funding to FIFA and AFC following the suspension of funding.

The sticking point, however, in the resumption of funding to the Humza Khan-led PFF Normalisation Committee — appointed by FIFA in September to resolve the long-running PFF crisis — was that there is no record, or audit for that matter, of total amount of US$2,100,000 spent by Hayat’s body from March last year to January this year.

It has been learnt that when Ashfaq took over the PFF headquarters, his body was given control of FIFA’s Forward bank account as well as the AFC’s Asian Financial Assistance Programme (AFAP) bank account but it wasn’t given the bills or paperwork of the amount that was spent by the officials of Hayat’s group.

Ashfaq’s body subsequently handed over the control of the accounts to the PFF Normalisation Committee and the aim of the delegation, comprising two members from FIFA and two from the AFC, is to find out more about where those funds were utilised. FIFA doesn’t release funding for the next year unless an audit of the previous year is held and sent.

A well-placed source in FIFA told Dawn that such a visit is “common protocol and has happened in several other member associations following the implementation of a Normalisation Committee there”.

A FIFA spokesperson had told Dawn on Monday that it was in the process of resuming funding to the PFF Normalisation Committee through its Forward development programme. “We are working with the PFF Normalisation Committee to resume Forward funding through their regular Forward bank acco*unt,” the spokesperson informed.

FIFA’s Forward programme gives a member association up to US$1,000,000 per year for operational and running costs and Humza confirmed the impending visit of the FIFA-AFC delegation.

“We’re looking forward to the delegation’s visit after which the financial matters will be cleared,” Humza told Dawn on Thursday.

AFC HOUSE VISIT

Earlier this month, Humza and PFF Normalisation Committee member Col Mujahidullah Tareen visited the AFC House in Kuala Lumpur, meeting AFC general secretary Dato’ Windsor John and other officials.

Following the meeting, Dato’ Windsor was quoted in a news release that the AFC expected the Normalisation Committee to “focus mainly on two tasks, holding the elections at all levels and running the day-to-day football affairs by ensuring Pakistan’s participation in international and regional competitions”.

For the completion of both tasks, the PFF Normalisation Committee will need funding from both FIFA and the AFC to resume. However, the AFC spokesperson told Dawn that financial issues weren’t discussed during the meeting.

“The AFC received the PFF NC chairman Humza Khan and the then Acting General Secretary Mujahid Ullah Khan at the AFC House on 18-19 November 2019,” the spokesperson said in a statement on Monday when asked if the Asian body was looking at resuming the AFAP funding.

“The PFF delegates had a fruitful meeting with AFC General Secretary Dato’ Windsor John and with other Departments of AFC. The departments also prepared a presentation for the PFF delegation to highlight their respective roles and responsibilities in the AFC. But the financial issues were not discussed and it remains the same as it was when the NC was inducted by FIFA in September 2019.”

https://www.dawn.com/news/1519363
 
The Bureau of the FIFA Council decided on 29 June 2022 to lift the suspension that was imposed on the Pakistan Football Federation (PFF) in April 2021 due to undue third-party interference.

The decision was taken after FIFA received confirmation that the normalisation committee of the PFF had regained full control of the PFF’s premises and was in a position to manage its finances.

The PFF was also informed that any undue interference in its affairs or action that could hinder the fulfilment of the mandate of the normalisation committee might lead to the PFF being suspended again and/or the imposition of other sanctions provided for in the FIFA Statutes.

As the deadline by which the normalisation committee was required to fulfil its mandate (30 June 2022) is now no longer realistic, the Bureau has also decided to extend the committee‘s mandate until 30 June 2023 at the latest. This will enable the latter to finally carry out the tasks assigned to it in full.

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