CFU’s Cochrane denies Derrick under pressure to resign

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The General Secretary of the Caribbean Football Union (CFU), Neil Cochrane, has denied claims that head of the organisation and fellow Antiguan, Gordon Derrick, is being pressured by some of the body’s executive members to give up the post of president.
Cochrane was reacting to claims that Derrick had been asked during a CFU meeting held in Aruba last week, to step down as president following a Court of Arbitration for Sports (CAS) ruling upholding an April 2016 decision by the FIFA Audit and Compliance Committee barring him from holding a FIFA vice president position.
“At no point in time, during the congress, was there a call for the resignation of the president of the CFU. There was one issue where a representative from the Dominican Republic would have asked for an addition to the agenda and based upon statutes for an extraordinary congress, that was not allowable. He had asked, in addition to the agenda, to have a discussion [about] the CAS ruling,” he said.
The decision had forced Derrick out of the CONCACAF presidency race as the head of that organisation automatically becomes a FIFA vice president.
First Vice-President Cheney Joseph, the Grenada Football Association boss, tendered his resignation on April 12, a week after Derrick was said to have been confronted by members to stand down.
But more dramatically, Puerto Rico Football Association president, Eric Labrador, quit his position on the floor of the CFU congress.
Cochrane said he has received only one resignation to date.
“For it to be official, a correspondence has to be sent to us and that’s one. Two, neither of the gentlemen, on the floor, and when the Puerto Rico president who is a member of the Exco [Executive Committee], said he is resigning, he did not say anything about the president [of CFU] and the CAS ruling. In fact, he spoke more about the administration which I would say, affects my part of the business. He spoke about things being late and those kind of things,” the GS said.
The matter in question, Cochrane added, was in fact addressed by Derrick during his presentation at last week’s congress.
“The president would have spoken and in his address to the congress he would have spoken to the matter but there were no further questions … he did give the position of what the ruling was about, what transpired and how he felt in relation to that matter,” he said.
In 2011, Derrick had received a reprimand by the FIFA Ethics Committee in relation to a wide-ranging bribery investigation of Caribbean football officials during the run-up to the FIFA presidential election of that year.
 
 

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