Audio Interview with Soccer Journalist Esteban Pagán Rivera who Interviewed PRFF President Eric Labrador who Received $40 K from CFU in FIFA Scandal
IMSoccer News brings you a very special podcast interview with Esteban Pagán Rivera who is the premier soccer journalist in Puerto Rico and who writes for Primera Hora.
Photo taken by the Bahamas FA who claimed they received a brown envelope with $40 thousand in 4 stacks of $100 bills. Labrador claims he received a similar envelope with the same amount of cash.
Esteban talked to the President of the Puerto Rican Football Federation, Eric Labrador, on Sunday and filed a report with his paper on Monday. That interview can be found here on IMS in English and here in at Primera Hora in Spanish.
Labrador reported to FIFA the $40 thousand he received at the Caribbean Football Union (CFU) meeting in May and is now deeply involved with FIFA’s Executive Committee investigation of the CFU. That committee is also investigating Asian Federation president Bin Hammam who had been running for FIFA presidency, and CONCACAF President Jack Warner.
Esteban talks to Jay Long and myself about his interview with Labrador and reveals more details of his conversation with the Puerto Rican Football Federation President as well as the possible fallout of this revelation.
We ask the questions should Labrador have ever accepted the gift in the first place and did he really understand what was happening at the time?
We also examine the fallout for the CFU and what the potential consequences for Labrador.
We also question if there will be repercussions for the Puerto Rico Islanders.
Please join Jay and I in this very interesting discussion with Esteban Pagán Rivera.
Comments are closed.
One point to ponder: Labrador was accompanied on that trip by Frankie Gautier, the FPF’s secretary general. Mr. Gautier has been the FPF’s secretary general for approximately 6 years. Mr. Gautier knew or should have known that an envelope with $40,000 in cash is HIGHLY irregular and a clear violation of the FIFA Code of Ethics, which specifically prohibits the acceptance of cash “gifts”. Mr. Gautier, however, has been implicated in a series of corruption scandals himself in Puerto Rico.
Furthermore, Mr. Labrador is a consummate politician and a former secretary of Puerto Rico’s Department of Recreation and Sports, a government instrumentality of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico. As a former government official, Mr. Labrador knew or should have known that acceptance of an envelope containing $40,000 is in all likelihood a violation of ethics and possibly the law.
It appears that Mr. Labrador deposited the funds in an FPF banking account and waited approximately 20 days before he reported it to FIFA. Getting the CFU letter and reporting the funds to US Customs was clever window dressing by Mr. Labrador in an action known in the legal profession as: “covering your ass”.
One final point. For Joe Serralta to become president of CFU is merely to substitute one corrupt and incompetent buffoon for another. Joe Serralta has been one of the most corrupt and incompetent federation presidents of the last 50 years. For starters, he is an unprocessed criminal, having impersonated a licensed engineer for more than 10 years in violation of Commonwealth law. This is a felony punishable with a term in prison. The Colegio de Ingenieros y Agrimensores de Puerto Rico, the self-regulatory organization that regulates PR engineers, issued a cease and desist order against Serralta and he was forced to remove the reference to “his” engineering license from the FPF’s official website. He has yet to explain himself.
With respect to your comment that he is the architect of Puerto Rican soccer, I suppose, if you consider designing and constructing a latrine an accomplishment worthy of praise. The Islanders became an important team AFTER he sold the team to the Guillermard group. Before that it was a no name and bankrupt team struggling to survive (mainly by not paying its players and coaching staff) and playing in a local non-FPF affiliated league.
His achievements as president of the FPF are equally “impressive”. In 6 years as president of the FPF, the senior men’s team had no more than 6 official games TOTAL, all either losses or ties. There were hardly any youth national team appearances of any age or gender, because he established an inverted pyramid structure for Puerto Rico’s soccer, which essentially ignored any type of youth development system. His crowning achievement as president, however, may have been the loss of the football tournament at the Central American and Caribbean Games after CONCACAF inspectors determined the playing venues were not up to FIFA standards. Incredibly, Serralta was completely detached from the process and never provided any explanations. He “saved” the day by transferring the women’s tournament (but not the men’s thereby betraying a team of hardworking young men) to Venezuela.
Now as president of the PRSL he continues his particular brand of executive excellence by presiding over a league where teams routinely cheat their players and coaches out of their salaries (something he did himself as the owner of the Islanders), teams routinely “reschedule” their games or take “sabbaticals” and “forget” to inform the league or their fans, some teams (3 to be exact) have to scramble to find a a playing field, some playing “home” games in a different field each week and the cherry on the sundae: 3 PRSL teams were expelled from the USL because they couldn’t meet their financial commitments–ironically, the same 3 teams that presume to challenge the Islanders for a spot in the CFU/CONCACACAF Champions League!
So yeah, Joe Serralta is PERFECT for the CFU presidency, after all to paraphrase the famous line in Roman Polanski’s Chinatown: “Forget it Jake, its CFU”!
@Mr. Randy Torres:
Welcome to IMS. Given your background with soccer in Puerto Rico, I am personally very honored that you have taken the time to participate in this particular forum.
The comments referring to Sr. Joe Serralta “being the architect of (professional) Puerto Rican soccer”, were mine, alone. That is my personal opinion.
While you and I both share a love of the game and desire only the best for Puerto Rican soccer, we disagree in some of our assessments and we differ in the words and type of rhetoric that we choose to communicate our thoughts on the subject.
I find many of Mr. Serralta’s accomplishments worthy of praise. There are other decisions that I have questioned.
During the discussion regading Esteban’s interview with Sr. Eric Labrador, while it was not noted that he was in previously charge of the DRD (Department of Recreation and Sports), if you take the time to review some of our more recent pieces relating to soccer in Puerto Rico, you will see that we have mentioned that specific fact to our readers.
You will also note that we have already attempted to introduce you to our readers…
http://www.insidemnsoccer.com/2011/05/18/fpf-president-responds-to-river-plate-accusations/
The Gautier angle is a fascinating facet of this particular story (even his continued participation in the FPF is something that could be descbribed as “fascinating”); thank you for introducing it to the discussion.
As far as several of your other points: some of them we will agree on. Many we will not. Our personal takes on those points are sometimes very similiar and at other times, complete, polar opposites.
Thanks again for participating here on IMS. By taking the intiative to mention you, several weeks prior to your posting your comments, we have attempted to acknowledge your participation in the discussion of matters of great importance to Puerto Rican football.
@Jay Long. I am frankly stunned and was completely unaware that you even knew of my existence. I’m flattered that you not only took the time to respond to my comment personally, but also to introduce me to your readers in a previous post. To be honest I have had limited exposure to your website before, but rest assured that it will now be part of my required daily reading.
I have no issue with differences of opinion, as a former investment banker I know that that is what moves markets and that is most definitely a good thing. The only caveat: speak the truth and treat people with respect. I always try to speak the truth (frankly, because its easier than lying), but I must confess to not suffering fools very gladly. I think you can see from my comments about Joe Serralta that that much is clear.
With respect to Puerto Rican soccer, I am sometimes reminded of the famous “hill of beans” line uttered by Rick at the end of Casablanca. We have so little to show for the quiet anonymous efforts of good and committed people over the past 100 years that it is particularly painful for me to see Puerto Rico in the eye of this FIFA scandal for all the wrong reasons. I suppose Mr. Labrador deserves the benefit of the doubt, but it strains credulity to accept the virtue of his actions.
Regarding Joe Serralta, when he was elected president of the FPF, I was one of the first persons to congratulate him and I was very excited about our soccer future. In fact, Serralta had offered me substantial support and assistance when I promoted the Copa Puerto Rico 2000, an international tournament that featured Dinamo Misnk of Belarus and the Tampa Bay Mutiny (yes, Valderrama played, and well!). I had every confidence in Serralta and I had very high expectations of him. What followed were a long series of embarrassments and bitter disappointments for Puerto Rico.
The problem has been, practically since time immemorial, that the FPF has been a veritable black hole of information. Always ignored by the mainstream press, successive federation presidents have taken advantage of anonymity and ignorance to pad their own pockets, even if the amounts were relatively insignificant. At the end of the day, its the kids that play and the image of Puerto Rico that pay the price . I’m hoping to contribute what I can to change that. Hopefully always with wise words and intelligent arguments, but when need be with fierce and uninhibited rhetoric.
Le envio un saludo grande!
Randy Torres