Davies: Tribunal has got it right
Football Association executive director David Davies has welcomed a tribunal’s report, which criticises former secretary Faria Alam for inventing sexual harassment claims.
The Employment Tribunal ruled against Alam in September and now in a report outlining its reasoning says the allegations were “a figment of her fertile imagination“.
Davies said: “I am pleased with the conclusions of the tribunal but I have regarded this matter as being closed ever since the verdict last September.”
The tribunal report also suggests Sven-Goran Eriksson was not completely frank with the FA during the Alam scandal when asked about allegations, which proved to be true, that he was having an affair with her.
One section of the report, paragraph 7.22, says: “During the course of the interview, Mr Eriksson said to Mr Norbury (the FA-appointed QC initially investigating the Eriksson-Alam affair) that he had not been specific about his answer to David Davies, but that he had used the word ’nonsense’ when the allegation was put to him by Mr Davies and that he told Mr Davies that ’his private life was his private life’.
“We are satisfied that the comment from Mr Eriksson supports Mr Davies’ account that, when he first raised with Mr Eriksson the allegation about an affair, his firm view at the end of the conversation was that Mr Eriksson was denying the affair.
“Of course Ms Alam also denied it to him, and it was with that background that the Football Association, through Mr Davies and Mr Gibson, issued the statement denying the affair.”
In 2004 Alam, then Davies’ secretary, had affairs with Eriksson and then chief executive Mark Palios and left the FA soon after her affair with Eriksson was exposed.
The tribunal also concluded that the FA did not sacrifice her “to protect Palios’ reputation“. Palios eventually resigned along with Colin Gibson, the FA’s director of communications.
