Goldfields heads for courts

Obuasi Goldfields Sporting Club are beating the war drums and will in the next few days drag the Ghana Football Association to the law courts in yet another suit that threatens the completion of the 2003 Kinapharma Premier League.

Only days ago, Prestea Mine Stars had to be prevailed upon to withdraw another suit against the FA from the courts.

The Goldfields court threat follows the dishevelling decision handed the club for the use of Valentine Atem in matches against Real Tamale United and Great Olympics, which resulted in the appeals committee of the FA dispiriting a whopping 16 points from Goldfields’ haul for the season.

The immediate effect of the decision is that rather than a placing among the top four most competitive clubs of the season, Goldfields must now slug it out for survival or head straight for relegation with only three difficult games to go.

The entire Goldfields family have not received the decision kindly and the club’s Chief Executive Captain Andy Sam, yesterday told the Soccer Express that it would not pay to appeal the decision before the very arms of the FA. What would serve justice, would be the straight court battle because he believes the club has a genuine case and should not have been punished at all. He said the Professional League Board, which is an arm of the GFA, cleared Atem to play in the premier league and he does not understand how another arm of the association, the Appeals Committee would declare him unqualified.

Asked if the club would exhaust the chains of avenues available for redress at the FA, Captain Sam said the pursuit of justice at the review stage would not serve the cause of natural justice.

"Can you go for review before the same panel? This is the only country where somebody makes a judgement and when you are not satisfied with the judgement you have to present it to the same people again. It doesn’t appeal to me that this is natural justice, because the person is going to stand by his own judgement. I would have thought that normally if you go before somebody and you don’t like the judgement you go to somebody else but in our GFA you have to go to that same person again and he is going to tell you the same thing again. We will not do that because we don’t think justice will be served."

He said looking at the composition of the Appeals Committee panel that would have to review the case if submitted, it is no different from the panel that heard the case and it would be a farce to go before them again.

"Naturally you are not going to get a fair deal. The review panel is going to be the same as the Appeals Committee people and how can I go to them, are they going to change their decision? The whole thing is a farce’, said Captain Sam, promising that Goldfields would take the matter as far as they have to.

The Appeals Committee on Tuesday adjudged that Goldfields erred in playing Valentine Atem in their matches against Real Tamale United and twice against Great Olympics for the lack of a work permit. The case went before the Appeals Committee after the Disciplinary Committee had earlier ruled the protests by Olympics and RTU as frivolous. Both Olympics and RTU loudly protested the Disciplinary Committee’s decision and swore fire and brimstone to get the decision overturned.