Palmer vs GFA: Amanda Clinton spells out possible outcomes of CAS verdict

A former Ghana Football Association presidential aspirant, Amanda Clinton, who is also an international lawyer and founding Partner of Clinton Consultancy, has been dilating on the various possible verdicts that may come out of the Court of Arbitration for Sports’ (CAS) regarding Tema Youth financier, Wilfred Kweku Osei’s case against the GFA following his disqualification from the association’s presidential race on ethical grounds.

“Palmer” is praying the apex court in world sports to overturn his disqualification in the 2019 elections, make him eligible to contest, annul last year’s elections which Kurt Okraku won and order a fresh election to decide a new GFA President.

Laying bare the various possibilites, Clinton said: “The first option, I think, for CAS to do, would be to have elections to be held this year. Only because you exclude all of them or none of them at first instance, which is, you know, when the vetting committee was reviewing three or four candidates that had ethics committee issues and because they failed to exclude more than one, I think that Palmer would have made the case that he was unfairly excluded and, therefore, it should go to re-election”, Amanda Clinton told Max TV.

“Where it gets a little dicey is even if the vetting committee has a standard like: look, we're going into football, we're sanitising it, we're not letting anybody in, just anybody. We have a really good standard.”

“The other issue is, so, why was that standard ignored for multiple candidates who had gone before the Ethics Committee in the years preceding the 2019 election and for pretty serious things, including match-fixing, changing players’ names, corruption, and had been mentioned in the Dzamefe Commission report”, she noted.

CAS is expected to release its verdict on 1 September 2020 after adjourning the pronouncement for the second time this year.