PORT OF SPAIN, Trinidad (CMC) – Embattled Trinidad and Tobago football chief William Wallace has raised the stakes in his battle against removal by Fifa, contending football’s world governing body had no power to oust his executive.

After filing an appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) last week, Wallace said while a relationship with Fifa was “vital”, the Trinidad and Tobago Football Association (TTFA) constitution remained the standard by which the governing body functioned.

“Make no mistake about it, the duly and properly elected executive of the Trinidad and Tobago Football Association remains in charge of the association’s business,” Wallace said in a bullish statement.

“I can only be removed by the operations of the TTFA’s own Constitution and not by Fifa That said, our relationship with Fifa is vital.”

He added: “I gave instructions to TTFA attorneys to file an appeal with the Court of Arbitration for Sport challenging Fifa’s decision to attempt to interfere into the day-to-day affairs of the TTFA.

“The attorneys confirmed that this was done and we have been assigned case number CAS2020/A/6915. Fifa and its purported normalisation committee headed by Mr Hadad has no standing.”

Fifa swooped down on the TTFA last month to take control of its operations, announcing it would replace the Wallace-led four-month-old executive with a normalisation committee.

According to FIFA’s statement, its recent financial assessment of the TTFA had uncovered “extremely low overall financial management methods, combined with a massive debt”, leaving the local body “facing a very real risk of insolvency and illiquidity”.

Local businessman Robert Hadad was subsequently appointed to lead the normalisation committee for the next two years, charged with establishing a debt-repayment plan, reviewing the TTFA’s statutes and overseeing new elections.

One of the TTFA’s lawyers, Matthew Gayle, said the local body had also reached out to Fifa, but had been snubbed.

“It is worth noting that we the attorneys [Dr Emir Crowne] for the TTFA led by William Wallace, we have reached out to FIFA asking them to deal with us directly to have discussion with them, and they have declined to respond to that correspondence,” Gayle said.

“We wrote three letters to them and we received no substantive response.