JTTA elections put off again

The overdue elections of the Jamaica Table Tennis Association (JTTA) will once again be pushed back as the constitutionally stipulated financial report and the final list of affiliates are incomplete and will not be ready for the annual general meeting (AGM), which was scheduled to take place this Saturday.

President of the JTTA, Andrew Lue, confirmed in an interview with The Gleaner that his executive body is having difficulties completing both documents. He also revealed plans to have the AGM and elections, constitutionally due since February, go ahead without the financial report.

“Saturday is not a reality. The accounts will not be ready,” Lue said.

According to sources, however, the AGM and elections on Saturday were always in doubt because the constitution states that after the financial report is ready, the executive needs to call a special general meeting for the report to be assessed by the affiliates before the AGM can be held.

Lue insists that the AGM and elections might have to be held without the financial report because of the difficulties encountered by the administration since being elected for its first term.

“We came into office in 2021, and the auditor wants to go back to 2020 to establish an accounting base to do 2021, which is, I don’t think that will be possible because we didn’t get the documents.

“What we might have to do is, go ahead with the unaudited financial statements and then have the AGM, which I don’t want to stretch out. We could have the AGM with the elections without the audited statements.

“It’s not constitutional, but that is what has been happening ever since, and it’s something that I didn’t want to have happened, but that’s just how it is,” Lue said.

Meanwhile, according to Lue, the legitimacy of affiliates is currently being investigated by the executive. He states that several are only operating as “paper clubs”.

“Several persons have paid their affiliate’s fee, but some of them are paper clubs, and it took us some time to do some investigations and contacts, and so on, and then we will be communicating with those paper clubs and say, ‘Thank you for your applications, but you don’t satisfy the requirement to be an affiliate, here is your money back. When you establish the requirements, then you can reapply.’ After this, we will publish the list,” Lue said.

The JTTA president outlined that the executive investigations revealed that several clubs are not operating within the ambit of the constitution, which includes each affiliate having an executive body, its own constitution, and a playing facility.

Lue cites an example of the investigators visiting a venue where an affiliate registered as its playing compound and being informed that the affiliate has never turned up at that particular venue.

“Some of these clubs, they only come around when it’s election time and pay up their affiliation fees to be able to vote, but they don’t have any active programme going on, they don’t even have a TT board. Some of them don’t even have a venue,” Lue said.