Some members of the Cameroonian delegation that travelled to Equatorial Guinea for the 2015 Africa Cup of Nations have been allegedly held in Equatorial Guinea for unpaid bills of some ten rooms they occupied at the Sofitel Hotel in Malabo.
According to a member of the delegation who spoke to the media on condition of anonymity, the finance controller of the Cameroon government delegation blatantly refused to pay the bills on grounds that the occupiers were not supposed to have stayed in such expensive presidential suites.
Cameroon Concord was reliably informed that all attempts at getting to the Finance Minister in Yaoundé has met with a stone wall as members of the minister’s secretariat who regular pick up the calls from Malabo responded by blaming the delegation for the defeat of the Lions by the Ivoirians.
The hotel has confiscated the keys of the technical crew of the Lions who went out to shop in town. They can no longer have access to their rooms to retrieve their luggage.
As a policy of the Africa Cup of Nations, CAF supports part payment of accommodation of the teams, and the other is for the leaders of the participating countries.
It is vital to include in this report that during the 1992 Africa Cup of Nation in Senegal, a delegation of Francophone Beti-Ewondo musicians were blocked in a hotel in Dakar over unpaid bills. It took a month for the Cameroon government to clear the bills before they were allowed to fly back to Cameroon.
