LABA holds meeting to restore order

Aug 05, 2008 Sports

Smith remains at the helm

By Edison Jefford
The Executive Council of the Linden Amateur Basketball Association (LABA) sought to restore order to its administration yesterday evening at its Executive monthly statutory meeting after a furore over a basketball tournament.

“We have a statutory meeting this afternoon where we will address the LABA in limbo”, General Secretary of the association responsible for basketball in Linden, Joe Chapman told Kaieteur Sport yesterday.

Chapman was sarcastically referring to a strap–line of a previous article in this newspaper, which appeared two Wednesdays ago under the headline “No ‘New Era’ this year”.

Director of the New Era Entertainment (NEE) group, Bobby Noel had revealed then that the LABA refused to grant them permission to stage their annual tournament after demanding a percentage of profit and competition rules.

“Basically it’s our monthly statutory meeting where we will discuss the last general meeting where the decision to shut down [the LABA] President [Uborn Smith] was overturn,” Chapman informed.

The General Secretary remained tight–lipped when pressed on the details surrounding the move to oust Smith as LABA President. He, however, confirmed that the coup came out of issues related to the NEE tournament.

“[The] LABA wrote NEE through Kings informing them that we wanted to see [the tournament] rules, that’s all we did! We never failed to sanction the tournament really!” Chapman emphatically exclaimed.

Noel had told Kaieteur Sport that the LABA wanted 10 percent of their gross profits, which they disagreed to pay because they had the stipulated 16 percent VAT and other mandatory costs to cover.

In the initial negotiations to stage the event, LABA had informed NEE that they can no longer independently approach the association to sanction the tournament but rather they must go through a club, which the group eventually did.

According to Noel, the promotion group that is second to only Georgetown–based Next Level Entertainment (NLE) in terms of magnitude, decided to use Kashif and Shanghai Kings to obtain the necessary sanction from the LABA.

However, when they re–approached the association at a subsequent meeting they were met with more ‘red tapes’. Noel said that the LABA requested tournament rules despite knowing that FIBA regulations govern the competition.

Because the LABA is a subsidiary of the Guyana Amateur Basketball Federation (GABF) all tournaments held under the aegis of either association must adopt FIBA (International Basketball Federation [in English]) rules.

In contrast, Chapman said that while that may generally be true, domestic rules must also govern tournaments.

“There must also be domestic rules that govern tournaments because you have to look at the domestic situation,” he noted.

This paper understands that all those events conspired against Smith’s administration when he lost a no–confidence vote 3–2. He was reinstated when those initial rebels expressed confidence in a second round of voting.

But Chapman refused to give details that led to Smith’s oscillating presidency, opting rather, to speak with this newspaper at a later date.