FARIA ALAM, the secretary who resigned from the Football Association after an affair with Sven-Göran Eriksson, the England head coach, was accused at an employment tribunal yesterday of lying repeatedly about being sexually harassed by David Davies, the FA’s executive director.
Ms Alam, 39, had been Mr Davies’s personal assistant until she resigned last summer after newspaper revelations of her affairs with Mr Eriksson and Mark Palios, then the FA chief executive.
Part of Ms Alam’s extensive claim against the FA for unfair constructive dismissal includes allegations that Mr Davies attempted to kiss her in the lift and badgered her with late-night text messages; but The Mail on Sunday reported at the weekend that in previously unpublished interviews, given on August 6 last year, less than 24 hours after her resignation, Ms Alam had specifically denied any suggestion of harassment by Mr Davies.
A reporter said to her: “So then, David Davies never came on to you?” She replied: “No, no.” She also described her boss as a lovely person who was jovial and chatty, and said: “We got on very well. I don’t see anything bad about him. We had a great rapport and I didn’t find him difficult to work for.”
Ms Alam did not name Mr Davies as the “third man” in the FA sex scandal until a few days before her employment tribunal case began last week.
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Jeffrey Bacon, counsel for the FA, said to Ms Alam: “You simply told a lie, knowing you were telling a lie and you were expecting that it would never come out and you would get away with it.”
Ms Alam said: “I am not trying to get away with anything.”
Mr Bacon added that if the content of the interview was true, then “everything you said under oath was simply not true”.
A clearly shaken Ms Alam insisted that she had not spoken of the alleged harassment last year because she did not want to bring up Mr Davies’s name and because she felt sorry for his wife. She said: “I didn’t want to bring anyone else into it and it is true he’s a good boss.”
Mr Bacon told her that if she had not been deceitful to the tribunal, then she must have been deceitful to The Mail on Sunday.
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She said: “I’m not being deceitful. I stand by what I said last year and I stand by what I said this year.”
The tribunal was adjourned until July 26, when lawyers for Ms Alam and the FA will make final submissions.