After hearing of "serious deficiencies" with regard to the organisation's 2010 financial accounts, including failure to declare taxes to the United States authorities, delegates launched a scathing attack on the past regime of former CONCACAF President Jack Warner and ex-general secretary Chuck Blazer.

A day that was supposed to all be about Jeffrey Webb being elected as the new CONCACAF President was completely overshadowed by revelations of tax evasion and misappropriation of funds by those who controlled CONCACAF in the past.

Warner (pictured above) resigned from all footballing activities last summer in the wake of the cash-for-votes scandal but Blazer - though replaced by Ted Howard at CONCACAF - is still a FIFA Executive Committee member.

In a remarkable and complex twist to one of the most unsavoury days in the history of football politics, a motion calling for the formal removal of Blazer from FIFA's inner sanctum was passed almost unanimously with just two countries voting against and three abstentions.

This action, however, can only be taken by FIFA itself, possibly as early as its own Congress here on Friday (May 25).

Blazer was the original whistle-blower who exposed the cash-for-votes scandal that led to a string of sanctions among Caribbean members.


This was payback time in the pursuit of the burly American as astonishing evidence of the tangled financial state of CONCACAF under the Warner/Blazer regime - conducted as part of an independent audit over the last five months - prompted fury among delegates.

It included CONCACAF allegedly concealing tax liabilities to the US Inland Revenue Service between 2007 and 2011 to the tune of millions of dollars.

But most incredible of all was the disclosure that the $22.5 million (£14.3 million/€17.9 million) Centre of Excellence in Trinidad was not owned by CONCACAF, as all its members had assumed, but - secretly - by two companies owned by Warner.

Cuban Federation President Luis Hernandez told Webb he was "sitting on a time bomb".

"In all our countries corruption and shady use of resources has a clear name: robbery and theft," he said.

"There are robbers with guns and there are robbers with white collars – and I don't want us to be represented by a thief with a white collar in FIFA."

Pedro Chaluja, President of the Panama Football Association, added in a clear dig at Blazer: "We can't have a person represent us on the Executive Committee of FIFA when this person has made us part of the shady business - it's unpardonable."

Justino Compean, the head of Mexican football, accused Blazer by name of "manipulating information" and "obscene irregularities".

Webb, forced to postpone approval of the 2010 figures to an Extraordinary Congress later this year, said he was "shell-shocked and dismayed" after hearing a stack of examples of financial mismanagement.

"This should not happen in this day and age and we must decide that it does not happen again," he said.

In closing the meeting, he did his best to accentuate the positive, revealing that he actually knew about all the claims several months ago.

"Every one of you feels my pain and disappointment," he said.

"Maybe I should have a mop rather than a broom.

"What we have heard today I heard three or four months ago.

"Let's end the past, start anew, set some new goals every single day."

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