SAMUDA BRUSHES ASIDE BECKFORD TO RETAIN JOA PRESIDENCY
...but there are changes to the executive, board of directors
CHRISTOPHER Samuda will serve another fouryear term as president of the Jamaica Olympic Association (JOA) after he was re-elected at yesterday’s extraordinary annual general meeting (AGM) held at Knutsford Court hotel in Kingston, beating presidential aspirant Alan Beckford 40-10 in the voting.
The election that was held two weeks before the start of the Olympic Games in Tokyo, Japan, saw the historic election of a female vice-president after Jackie Cowan of the Jamaica Volleyball Association outpolled incumbent first Vice-president Nelson “Chris” Stokes by eight votes, 29-21, to become the first female to hold the position.
Robert Scott, who served on the previous executive as a director and is the general secretary of the Jamaica Rowing Federation, is the new second vice-president after he got the nod over veteran sports administrator Ian Forbes, 33-17.
Nichole Case of the Jamaica Badminton Association was returned unopposed as treasurer, while Fabian Stewart and Gary Peart were elected for their first terms as directors and will join Laurel Smith, Yvonne Kong and Raymond Anderson, who were re-elected, as Ian Forbes, Rhonda Hutson and John Isaacs failed to get the requisite number of votes.
Samuda defended the absence of audited financial statements at the meeting and said they would be presented at an annual general meeting set for later this year. “The constitution allows us to hold elections without audited financials,” he said after the elections. “Whatever is said about audited financials I think it is scaremongering, we have our audit in train and we will present them at our AGM later this year and I can tell you the figures are looking absolutely good, better than 2019.”
A tough-sounding Samuda cautioned anyone who would present his executive in a negative light, saying, “false information was purveyed” in the lead-up to the election, and warned: “I am cautioning persons that they should in fact check the records first before they assimilate and before they, of course, transmit that information to the public; people’s reputation are at stake but clearly our reputations are not at stake at all because this vote demonstrates that our reputation is in fact intact and therefore
we will look to the next four years and we will continue to do good work.
“We are exceptionally proud in terms of our records; we have brought a corporate structure to the Jamaica Olympic Association, a financial governance that has got the commendation from the International Olympic Committee, so we continue in that vein, we will deepen our member engagement,” he said as he listed some of the successes of his last four years in office.
Samuda also warned that elections in the future would be conducted under certain protocols. “Going forward, we are going to have establish protocols in relation to campaigning and the elections, that will be done in short order,” he told members of the media. “So on the next occasion I don’t expect there will be any aberrations and I expect that everyone will comply with the protocols that will be in place to govern conduct.”
Beckford, who had campaigned for the better part of a year since resigning from the JOA where he served as a director, said he had no complaints about the outcome of the voting but felt two weeks was not enough time.
“I have no complaints, I did the best that I could do, the members spoke and they decided who they wanted for the next four years,” he said, adding he would still be involved in sports.
“It was difficult to get two weeks to prepare for an election, clearly I don’t think it is good democracy and I believe in fixed date elections,” Beckford said, adding that he believes the JOA still has a lot of things to fix. “I have no regrets and will do it again.”