By Andrew Warshaw
September 19 – The husband of Amelia Gan, finance director of the Asian Football Confederation (AFC) at the time it was run by Mohamed Bin Hammam, has pleaded not guilty to stealing in the latest cloak-and-dagger development in the ongoing corruption probe into Bin Hammam’s conduct.
Kong Lee Toong appeared before a magistrate in Kuala Lumpur charged with stealing papers from the AFC’s offices on July 31 apparently relating to Bin Hammam’s personal banking transactions.
Gan, currently out of the country, is expected to be charged too when she returns.
A conviction carries a prison sentence of up to 10 years.
Bin Hammam is fighting allegations of financial mismanagement contained in an AFC-commissioned audit into his behaviour when he was President.
The missing documents allegedly relate to a $2 million (£1.3 million/€1.6 million) payment made in 2008.
In a letter last month to 20 Asian associations, Bin Hammam confirmed he made certain payments but said they came out of his own bank accounts and were personal.
He claimed the gestures, including to acting AFC President Zhang Jilong, were driven by a desire to help those in need.
Ironically, it was Zhang who ordered the PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) audit that accused Bin Hammam (pictured above) of receiving millions of dollars from individuals linked to AFC contracts and spending tens of thousands of dollars on personal items.
In July, Bin Hammam had his lifetime ban from football overturned by the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), which ruled there was not enough evidence to convict him, but stopped short of saying he was innocent.
The ban had been imposed after FIFA’s Ethics Committee found Bin Hammam had bribed Caribbean voters when he challenged Sepp Blatter for the FIFA Presidency last year.
He has consistently claimed the whole debacle is a vendetta by opponents to force him to quit football for good but is determined to clear his name first.
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