A-League clubs’ fight with FFA gets personal with FIFA letter
A NUMBER of FFA board members have a litany of potential conflicts of interest, A-League clubs have claimed in a letter to the sport’s world governing body on the eve of today’s crunch power summit.
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THE fight for control of Australian football has turned personal ahead of today’s crunch power summit, with the A-League clubs writing to FIFA with what they claim are a litany of potential conflicts of interest among the directors of Football Federation Australia.
Having for months raised “concerns as to the independence of the Board”, the clubs’ umbrella group, the Australian Professional Football Clubs Association (APFCA) sent the incendiary document to FIFA and a host of interested parties in Australian football, just hours before FFA’s AGM at which chairman Steven Lowy will attempt to push through controversial reforms to the game’s power structure.
The list of alleged potential conflicts of interest include the fact that one director, Crispin Murray, runs an investment trust that supported Frank Lowy’s demerger of the Westfield Group in 2014 — just over a year before he joined the FFA board — and according to newspaper reports helped it to succeed.
There is no allegation that Mr Murray ever worked directly for Mr Lowy or for Westfield.
The document also claims, on the basis of magazine profiles, that CBA executive Kelly Bayer Rosmarin ran the Westfield account at the bank before being nominated to join FFA’s board.
A CBA spokesman said: “We don’t comment on individual clients — current or prospective.”
Finance Asia reported in 2015 that she ran the Westfield account along with several others of the bank’s major clients.
The list of potential claimed conflicts also records a succession of professional, social and community links between the board members going back long before their involvement with FFA, and that one director, Daniel Moulis, has provided legal services to Westfield for almost a decade.
In a statement to the Daily Telegraph, Moulis said: “The football community knows of and appreciates my complete independence, and that my heart is with the game and always will be.”
In the accompanying letter sent by Adelaide United chairman Greg Griffin, on behalf of APFCA, he claims the list is based on “open source” information all in the public domain.
He also claims the FFA board “has made decisions of recent times to the significant financial detriment of the A-League Clubs.”
It comes just hours before Lowy will seek backing for reform of FFA’s annual Congress which elects the governing body’s board of directors.
If he fails today FIFA has threatened to sack the existing board and step in to run the game.
Lowy has previously defended the independence of his board and in August warned about the clubs seeking a “return to the bad old days of self-interest” from which football would “suffer the inevitable results”.
The FFA has been approached for comment.