How Safa forked out R10m to clear SA's name with Fifa

The South African Football Association (Safa) have revealed that they spent R10 million assisting football governing body Fifa in an investigation into the disputed $10-million that was wired to the Caribbean after SA’s successful bid to stage the 2010 World Cup.

Safa CEO Dennis Mumble told TimesLIVE that he wrote a letter to Fifa last year offering assistance and the world football governing body happily accepted the help.

“It was in support of Fifa’s investigation because we were never accused of anything other than what was in the media and on social media‚” Mumble said.

“Fifa was looking into what was alleged by the Americans and by the Swiss authorities. But because the American investigation mentioned South Africans‚ we thought we also needed to clear the air.

“I wrote a letter to Fifa early last year and said we would support the investigation and I asked them to let us know how we could that.

“Fifa took us up on that and they said ‘Thank you very much for your offer of support‚ we would like to know the following … ’.

South Africa was under sustained attack for months after questions were first asked about a disputed $10-million sum that was wired from a Fifa account in Switzerland to the Caribbean in 2008.

Letters from South Africa to Fifa asked for the princely amount to be managed by Trinidad and Tobago businessman and now disgraced former Fifa vice-president Jack Warner.

The money was allegedly aimed at financing development projects in the Caribbean.

Mumble said Safa were assisted by legal eagles Zola Majavu and Norman Arendse‚ among others‚ and submitted all the information to Fifa.

“They [Fifa] asked for a lot of information‚ documents which we had to go and dig into our archives [for] in the 2010 World Cup Local Organising committee (LOC). The LOC handed some documents to us but not all the documents‚” he said.

“We have got sufficient amount of documents to prove beyond a doubt the sequence of events that led to the transfer of the $10 million to the Caribbean and we outlined all that.

“That support required a lot of legal help to follow up and look into some of the things needed to compile reports‚ documents and do some research.

“That took a lot of time.

“Fifa did not have a lot of the documents they were looking for and eventually they finalised their report and obviously there was nothing found on South Africa but not because we were accused of anything.

“But it cost us a lot of money to go into records‚ to go and look into things that were done previously‚ to follow up so that whatever it is we put was truthful and there were facts to support it.”