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Petros Kausiyo Deputy Sports Editor
FORMER ZIFA Trustee Tshinga Dube has backed Ben Gwarada in his battle against the troubled Association, arguing the businessman was pushed into the drastic action, after being frustrated by unfulfilled promises from chief executive Jonathan Mashingaidze. Gwarada has secured a High court order that allows him to auction the ZIFA Houses in Harare and Bulawayo in order to recover a long standing debt that initially was $90 000 before ballooning to $340 000.
The ZIFA headquarters at 53 Livingstone, the ZIFA Village in Mt Hampden, another property in Kensington Park and the building that houses the Association’s Southern Region offices in Bulawayo, have been set down for auctioning today after Gwarada secured a High Court Writ to attach the properties. But the directors of ZIFA Private Limited, who claim ownership of the properties, are understood to have filed an Interpleader yesterday and are seeking to have the sale stopped.
ZIFA lawyer, Ralph Maganga, could not be reached for comment while one of the shareholders of the ZIFA Private Limited, Abdullah Kassim, declined to discuss the matter.
LED Travel and Tours were issued with the writ earlier this month after ZIFA had failed to service the long-standing debts emanating from air tickets secured for the Warriors to fly to Guinea during their failed 2014 World Cup qualifying campaign. It is Gwarada’s contention through his company that the ZIFA debt, had since ballooned to $340 000 because of interests and legal costs.
LED Travel and Tours accrued the debts through loans advanced to them by BancABC and FBC banks to finance the Warriors travel.
“When ZIFA found themselves in the deep end of financial problems, they proposed to form a ZIFA Trust which I headed and they said their debt was $6 million,” said Tshinga Dube. “When we started, there was a lot of enthusiasm and I had been asked to chair the Trust (because of my chairmanship of Marange Resources), and we had other people from Mbada, the National Social Security Authority, Nyaradzo Funeral Company and George Shaya.
“The main purpose was to assist raise funds for ZIFA and (with its $6 million debt) and we were quite enthusiastic that we could do our part to help. We always met after hours to try and breathe life into ZIFA but it was not easy to convince the corporate world due to its poor credit record and, of course, the current economic times.
“Then there was no money the tickets and the national team was stranded. It was hard to convince the corporate world because of ZIFA’s bad reputation and lack of transparency. So we approached Gwarada and out of patriotism he had to go to the bank and borrow.
“He also did this because we had been told that FIFA was to send money that was to be used to liquidate what Gwarada was facilitating with the bank. I even put my own title deeds as collateral. We struggled so much that the team ended up travelling in batches and it was embarrassing because some of the team members eventually failed to reach Conakry on time after leaving Harare, said Tshinga Dube.
Online Reporter