Well the plot surrounding this year’s Kashif and Shanghai football tournament is thickening. Yesterday Minister of Culture, Youth and Sport Dr. Frank Anthony told Stabroek Sport that no request had ever been received from the Kashif and Shanghai organization to lend support to the staging of the year end football fiesta. “Last year they apparently had enough sponsorship and they only asked me to open the tournament and I agreed.
This year they have not contacted us to say anything nor ask for anything so we do not know anything about us denying sponsorship or support when we do not even know what their needs are,” Anthony told Stabroek Sport. Anthony’s statements were backed up by Director of Sport Neil Kumar who said in his capacity as Director of Sport that he had also never seen any request for support for the tournament from the ministry.
The Minister of Sport said that at this late stage he is unsure what level of support his ministry can lend but is still open to meeting with the organising duo.
This is in stark contrast to what was told to Stabroek Sport earlier this month by the organizers who said then, that they had lost two major sponsors in Swiss House Cambio, through the death of proprietor Farouk Razack, and the Ministry of Sport.
Yesterday Kashif Muhammad said his organization had dispatched a letter to the Minister’s office seeking a meeting with him on the staging of the tournament. He would offer no comment on the Minister’s assertions that he had never been approached, saying he preferred to leave the issue alone until meeting with Anthony. Approached on the issue after his press conference last Monday, President Bharrat Jagdeo took a similar stance to that of Anthony saying his only awareness of the issues surrounding the staging of this year’s tournament was from media reports. There have been some concerns about whether or not this year’s tournament will go ahead given some new factors that are believed to be affecting the plans of the organizers. Stabroek Sport has been reporting that the Guyana Football Federation (GFF) levy of approximately 900,000 dollars coupled with the introduction of the Value Added Tax of 16 percent on gross gate receipts has forced a rethink of the feasibility of this year’s tournament by the dynamic duo. Muhammad and his organizing partner Aubrey ‘Shanghai’ Major hosted a press conference about one and a half weeks ago to announce that they had sought meetings with President Jagdeo and GFF President Colin Klass and to call for a level of privacy in the run up to those meetings.
They said then that there were some issues, but neither confirmed nor denied that VAT and the GFF levy were among those issues. However, they did confirm that the tournament not being held this year was a possibility. The Kashif and Shanghai year end spectacular has become a fixture on the nation’s entertainment calendar and provides a much needed economic boost for several persons and communities, mainly Linden which has had flagging economic fortunes in recent times.
The tournament sees a pike in virtually every commercial activity in the mining town resulting in booming business for all levels of entrepreneur ranging from restaurateurs, to taxi services, to hotels in the area.
