Eligibility Votes - March 2022

[Alex McFarlane]

I agree that it is morally wrong to deprive Matthew of his SCO status simply because we got it wrong in the first place.  An AGM accepted him.  Once accepted, unless he does something wrong, then that is the only position that should be adopted.

I am slightly concerned with the impression given by the phrase that he was about to be 'deregistered by England'.  Whilst this is strictly speaking true (and several English players were 'deregistered'), if my memory is correct, the reason for the deregistration was that they had refused to renew their ECF membership at a significantly high level.  Both England and India used this as a method of punishing players who did not take out the required membership.  FIDE now charges federations which adopt this method of gaining enhanced memberships.  If there was another reason for the threatened deregistration I apologise.
(The ECF Director who introduced this 'system' failed to be re-elected.)

If a motion was passed to compensate Matthew this could be quite expensive. There is an annual fee for those registered as FID in the normal way. A FID player does not provide alternative nationalities for title norm events. This would deprive Matt of invitations to such norm events.