FAI unable to reveal latest financial accounts ahead of July’s agm

The FAI has told members that it will not be in a position to present audited accounts to this month's agm in Trim with the process of publishing figures for 2018 complicated by the wider attempt to clarify the association's financial position.

With a number of other investigations and reviews still ongoing, the organisation’s auditors, Deloitte, have yet to commence the work of preparing accounts for the last financial year but are expected to do so shortly.

The accounts are traditionally sent to clubs and affiliates a couple of weeks before the agm takes place, notionally so that delegates can look over them and raise any issues they might have at the conference with the association’s finance director or chief executive although in practice this had not happened in many years.

Still, the fact that the accounts were available prior to the event has been the established practice and in a letter to clubs and affiliates entitled to be represented there, FAI president Donal Conway says that on this occasion it is "necessary that this element of the business of the agm be adjourned until such time as the accounts are finalised, and the audited accounts can be laid before the members".

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In the letter, Conway provides formal notification that an extraordinary general meeting will be held one week before the agm in order to start the process of implementing the rule and other changes recommended by the Governance Review Group in the their recent report.

That, he says, will be just the first part of an implementation process he now concedes “is a complex exercise that will be completed in a number of stages and over a period of time”.

There had previously been a suggestion that all of the changes envisaged might somehow be pushed through on the day but questions regarding the practicality of such an approach had been widely raised.

Doubts about whether the association’s leadership can muster the two thirds majority required to get many of the proposed reforms past delegates have also been expressed by observers with inside knowledge of the process and political challenges involved.

Conway says that the association is to embark on a campaign to persuade affiliates to support the changes between now and the two meetings where the votes will take place.

He also reiterated that “at least one or possibly a maximum of two members [of the current board] might consider putting themselves forward for position on the interim board”. Conway himself is widely expected to run again.