Video bribery saga: My hands are clean ―Yusuf

Coach Salisu Yusuf has denied he took money from undercover journalists led by Ghana’s Anas Aremeyaw Anas posing as football agents to select two players for this year’s African Nations Championship (CHAN) in Morocco.

A sting video, which has aired on the various platforms of the BBC showed Yusuf collecting a reported $1,000 to pick two players from the 2017 WAFU Nations Cup in Ghana for the 2018 CHAN in Morocco.

In his defence, Salisu, who is undergoing medical treatment in London, said he neither asked for the money nor did he promise the agents he will pick the players because of the cash they gave him.

“I confirm meeting with two persons in September 2017 at the said Best Western Plus Atlantic Hotel, Ghana where I had lodged, who introduced themselves as football agents to two players whose names I cannot now remember. These individuals spoke to me, among other football related matters, on the possibility of their principals playing in the African Nations Championship in Nigerian colours. I can remember giving them my honest answer to the end that if the said players were found suitable in the selection process, they would indeed be selected. My response was neither a promise nor a commitment, knowing that I was not the sole person saddled with selecting players for any particular game,” said Salisu in the defence he forwarded to BBC.

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“Be that as it may, I did accept cash handed to me by one of the said football agents, which I later discovered, upon checking, to be $750 and not $1000.

“In any case, I did accept $750 handed to me by one of the two agents to the two Nigerian players only as a gift of trivial and symbolic value and not as an inducement to play the two players represented by the two agents, as Anas Aremeyaw Anas and Tiger Eye would want you to believe.”