Check all candidates

Liberia’s Bility tells FIFA

After being rejected to contest the presidency of the world football governing body FIFA, Liberia’s Football Association President Mr. Musa Bility wants integrity checks conducted against all candidates in the race.

“I appreciate that this is the first ever attempt by FIFA to be so engaged – to conduct integrity checks on candidates. Needless to say, I invited the scrutiny when I placed my name in public contention and am pleased that FIFA will conduct integrity checks on all candidates,” he said in a statement.

He says he finds it mind-boggling that an ethics probe against him would admittedly be based on information from “tabloid-like” sources which are internationally unacceptable because it obviously lacks credibility.

Mr. Bility says his team is compelled to wonder if FIFA’s investigative standard and poor quality of work was deliberately restricted to my candidacy.

He wonders if only the “inner chambers of FIFA and not the voting federations” know about the integrity of individuals into whose hands the future of football is to be placed.

“Is it enough that such poor quality of work is admittedly carried out and its findings made exclusively to the inner chambers which proceeds to publicly disclose who is “qualified”, and therefore acceptable to the inner chambers?,” he adds.

He says he has instructed his team to share the information with various voting federations along with proof of its obviously poor quality.

“As all will find, the Ad-Hoc Elections Committee mainly noted two types of breaches which it claimed undermined my eligibility as a candidate. One type consists of Liberian-related issues and the other has to do with my suspension by CAF,” he said.

Mr. Bility insists that none of the alleged breaches in Liberia mentioned in the decision and the said investigative report have ever led to a guilty verdict in the courts of Liberia.

“In fact, the investigative report uncharacteristically admits a dismissal by the courts,” he contends. With regards to the CAF suspension, he repeated that he will always stand up for what is right, recalling that at the time, he discovered and spoke against issues associated with the governance of CAF.