By Robson Sharuko
Trevor Carelse-Juul’s suitability to become the next ZIFA president is under the microscope after veteran journalist, Geoff Nyarota, launched a blistering attack on the Johannesburg-based businessman, effectively branding him a questionable individual not fit to lead Zimbabwe football.
Carelse-Juul won about a quarter of the votes, among the ZIFA councillors, in the poll for the Association’s president in March last year, his 14 votes earning him second place in the first round behind eventual winner, Cuthbert Dube and forcing the elections into a second round.
A former ZIFA leader, credited by some for laying the foundation on which the Dream Team was built in the early ‘90s, Carelse-Juul was also a firm favourite among respondents to an online poll, conducted by The Herald in the countdown to the ZIFA elections last year, to become leader of domestic football.
His handlers have been preparing the stage for him to launch a fresh bid for the ZIFA presidency at the polls set for December 5 to replace Dube, who quit on the eve of an extraordinary general meeting where the councillors kicked him out, after overwhelmingly revoking the mandate they had given him to be their leader.
Carelse-Juul has been making trips to Harare to discuss with his backers about the possibility of launching another bid for the ZIFA presidency while his handlers have been consulting with councillors and asking them to back him.
That he earned slightly under a quarter of the votes, during the last elections, suggest that Carelse-Juul enjoys some support within a considerable constituency of the ZIFA Council, although others feel that his invisibility from the game, while domestic football staggered from one crisis to another since Dube won a second term as leader, has eroded part of the backing he enjoyed last year.
Others feel the fact that he has effectively divorced himself from domestic football, for more than two decades, rules him out of the group of Messiahs, battle-hardened by the challenges that the game has faced during his absence, from where the councillors believe their next leader should be picked.
However, others feel that he has been far away from all the madness that has been going on, makes him the right candidate to come on board and be the ZIFA president who can take the troubled national game, burdened by a crippling debt, forward.
However, veteran journalist Nyarota feels Carelse-Juul isn’t the Prince Charming that football writers in this country have been painting him to be and says the businessman has a dark past which makes him unsuitable to be the man who should be trusted to lead Zimbabwe football.
In an opinion yesterday, Nyarota claimed Carelse-Juul and his ZIFA leadership were “unceremoniously sacked en-masse in 1993” after he fell out with the Sports and Recreation Commission for failing to remit levies from gate-takings at a time the Warriors were drawing full-houses to their matches at the National Sports Stadium as the Dream Team dazzled fans.
“He (Carelse-Juul) and his entire board were forced to resign amid allegations of misappropriation of funds at ZIFA,” Nyarota wrote.
“Such details about the previous career of a candidate for the top post at ZIFA should be placed in the public domain in any article that seeks to profile him during his planned return to the top echelons of administration of Zimbabwe football.
“More seriously, Carelse-Juul’s long sojourn in South Africa, which goes back to December 1999, is certainly not cast in the same innocent template as the self-imposed exile of hundreds of thousands of other Zimbabweans who are based in the same South Africa or elsewhere in the Diaspora.
“Carelse-Juul fled from Zimbabwe on December 10, 1999, after details of his acts of alleged massive corruption as an alleged accomplice of one Samuel Sipepa Nkomo, the then little-known principal officer of the wealthy Mining Industry Pension Fund (MIPF), were placed in the public domain.
“The Fund was then engaged in the construction of one of Harare’s newest high-rise projects, Angwa City, at the apex of Angwa Street and Julius Nyerere Way.
“An intensive probe . . . revealed in an article published on December 9, 1999, that Nkomo, allegedly acting in elaborate connivance with his close friend, Carelse-Juul, had been the beneficiary in 45 cases of fraud linked to the Z$564 million construction project.
“Nkomo immediately resigned from MIPF. He was charged with fraud and corruption, totalling Z$4,5 million, a staggering amount at the time (and) after two preliminary court appearances, the prosecution surprised all concerned by withdrawing charges against him before he had entered plea, pending further investigation by the police.
“A substantial and detailed dossier simply faded away.”
Nyarota claims there were irregularities in the manner that SBT Juul Africa, the company owned by Carelse-Juul, won the tender to manage the Angwa City project with various players involved in the transaction benefiting from underhand payments, including a Z$1 million payment from Makoni Copper International (MCI), another company owner by the businessman, to Nkomo.
Interestingly, Carelse-Juul paraded the Angwa City project as one of the highlights of his success stories in the manifesto he prepared ahead of the ZIFA elections last year.
“TDCJ (Trevor David Carelse-Juul), who is a natural leader, has led teams that have won over ten international designs and bid Architectural Development competitions, he is also the only ever African International winner of the British Construction Industry Awards for Angwa Centre, a mixed use development in Harare, Zimbabwe, a flagship development of Zimbabwe,” the manifesto read.
Documents, claims Nyarota, showed that MCI, through its trading arm Concept Office Furniture, which was owned by Carelse-Juul’s wife, Anita, made several payments, including electricity and telephone bills for Sipepa Enterprises and covered wages, rentals, purchase of materials and other operational expenses.
“Apart from the settlement by companies associated with Carelse-Juul of telephone and electricity bills for Nomagqweta Nkomo’s (the then wife of Sipepa Nkomo) clothing factory in Southerton, two payments of Z$400 000 each were made by Concept Furniture to UDC, a Harare finance company of which Nkomo was a director and to which he owed Z$1 million,” Nyarota wrote.
“In February 1999, MCI had paid 1 867 British pounds on behalf of Taymin into Nkomo’s Diner Club account in London. Six months later Taylor Woodrow Construction (a British company recommended by SBT Juul Africa as the main contractor on the Angwa City project) paid US$5 644 to Southwestern Adventist University in Texas in the United States of America, where Nkomo’s son was a student.
“Nkomo was an elder of the Seventh Day Adventist Church in Zimbabwe. In November, Taymin (a joint company formed by Taylor Woodrow and MIPF) paid 1 342 British pounds to the Royal Garden Hotel in London on Nkomo’s behalf. The paper trail was long.
“Confronted with these many allegations he (Carelse-Juul) became slippery but the information and documents in our possession were too overwhelming. Instead, he pleaded for time to respond to the allegations, saying he had to travel to Johannesburg on urgent business.
“He did return to Harare briefly, then left town, never to set foot in Harare again, to the best of my knowledge, (only) to resurface in 2014, when, to the amazement of those who know him well, he made a renewed bid for the ZIFA presidency.
“Given this and the sordid details of his history, it is sincerely hoped that his people on the ground in Zimbabwe will tell Trevor Carelse-Juul that he clearly has no legitimate business weighing any options for ZIFA’s top job in 2015, unless he genuinely believes, of course, that Zimbabwe’s football fraternity has a collectively defective memory. The Herald
