A day af­ter a for­mer spe­cial ad­vis­er to the T&T Foot­ball As­so­ci­a­tion (TTFA) Jack Warn­er was said to have failed to sub­mit claims for monies owed to him by the TTFA, a claim was sub­mit­ted.

Maria Daniel, the au­tho­rised trustee for the TTFA/Nor­mal­i­sa­tion Com­mit­tee deal­ing with claims from cred­i­tors in a bid to liq­ui­date a $98.5 mil­lion TTFA debt, con­firmed that Warn­er, a for­mer Con­ca­caf pres­i­dent and FI­FA vice pres­i­dent who was even­tu­al­ly banned from all foot­ball over al­le­ga­tions of cor­rup­tion, sub­mit­ted a claim for $22.7 mil­lion on Fri­day.

How­ev­er, he has fall­en short of pro­vid­ing sat­is­fac­to­ry sup­port­ing doc­u­ments to val­i­date the claims.  

"Mr Warn­er ac­tu­al­ly sent in a claim to­day (Fri­day) with the same fig­ures stat­ed $22.7 mil­lion. Again, I will have to go through sec­tion 139(2) where per­sons no­ti­fied un­der sec­tion one, and they were no­ti­fied, do not prove their claim with­in the time lim­it or with­in such fur­ther time as the court may al­low.

"Mr Warn­er's claims will have to be val­i­dat­ed. Right now, there is no sup­port for the claim that would make it val­i­dat­ed at this point, so he has to send in more in­for­ma­tion," Daniel ex­plained.

Warn­er was among some 299 cred­i­tors who vot­ed unan­i­mous­ly in favour of a debt re­pay­ment pro­pos­al through the Bank­rupt­cy Act that will see them re­ceive based on the cur­rent val­i­dat­ed claims any­where from 63 cents in the dol­lar to 100 per­cent of the monies owed to them.

The meet­ing was held at the Home of Foot­ball, Cou­va and chaired re­mote­ly by the Su­per­vi­sor of In­sol­ven­cy, who was in quar­an­tine.

Daniel, who sought to ex­plain how some of the en­tire process­es were done, said: "The way the process went when we did the no­tice of in­ten­tion which would be the first no­tice would be every­thing that the TTFA had in their knowl­edge of pos­si­ble debts, so it would be their trade payables, le­gal mat­ters that would be con­sid­ered con­tin­gen­cies, it would be every­thing.

"So what that re­al­ly had was all the con­tin­gen­cies and when I say con­tin­gen­cies, I mean if some­body says you owe me $5 mil­lion or you owe me $10 mil­lion but no court or no ac­tion has agreed to that debt.  

"The sec­ond step was for peo­ple to put in a claim form and that would have moved the num­bers from $98.5 mil­lion to $59 mil­lion.

"Af­ter you send in your claims, we look at these claims and as the trustee, I have the pow­er to au­tho­rise whether to ac­cept the claim based on the in­for­ma­tion sent. Now that in­fo must sup­port what you're say­ing from two per­spec­tives, that it was some­thing that the TTFA agrees to and the val­ue you have put in is rea­son­able and fair.

"So on that ba­sis, we would have gone through all the claims, looked at the sup­port­ing doc­u­ments, looked at what peo­ple were claim­ing, etc and that moved the fig­ure from the $59 mil­lion to $34 mil­lion."

The pro­pos­al, which was de­vel­oped by Daniel and her EY Team in col­lab­o­ra­tion with the TTFA’s FI­FA-ap­point­ed Nor­mal­i­sa­tion Com­mit­tee, will be fund­ed by an in­ter­est-free USD3.5 mil­lion in­stru­ment that the TTFA will have 10 years to re­pay. Cred­i­tors owed up to TT$200,000 will be paid in full and the bal­ances above that will be pro-rat­ed. They will al­so have the op­tion to be paid in US or TT dol­lars.

The pro­pos­al was skil­ful­ly craft­ed to pro­tect the em­bat­tled foot­ball as­so­ci­a­tion from any le­gal ac­tion in the fu­ture.

Daniel said: "That is the rea­son that this Act works, it ac­tu­al­ly stops the le­gal ac­tion. Any­thing that comes up be­fore the date of the no­tice of in­ten­tion, falls un­der this same process.

"How­ev­er, if there was a claim and there was a dis­agree­ment, what­ev­er was agreed up­on af­ter­wards, this is a step back. For the claims that I have in­val­i­dat­ed or dis­agreed with, there is a 30-day no­tice for you to come back and ar­gue your point or look at it, and there­fore it could still change.

"The amount can go un­der 63 cents. We said very clear­ly that based on the val­i­dat­ed claims at this point in time, so the first time we spoke about it, it was 30-some­thing cents be­cause we had $59 mil­lion worth of claims.

"We brought that down to $34.4 mil­lion based on val­i­da­tions so the cents went up plus we got a lit­tle ex­tra in the pool. So what would hap­pen now is that if there are sig­nif­i­cant claims that would be al­lowed, it's the one pool so pro-ra­ta each per­son could get less but it can not fall be­low the 100 cents for the peo­ple who are $200,000 and be­low."

Mean­while, Robert Hadad re­fused to ex­plain where monies to fi­nance this debt erad­i­ca­tion were sourced. Ac­cord­ing to Hadad: "We chose not to re­veal that just yet un­til we have the con­di­tions of the loan fi­nalised and we get all the de­tails of the re­pay­ment etc."