Former KAMAZ player accuses club officials of forcible contract termination

Baltika Kaliningrad defender Alexander Kukanos has filed a claim to the Labor Union of Footballers and Coaches against his former club KAMAZ Naberezhnye Chelny. According to the player, the club had forced him to terminate his contract, forged documents repeatedly, and failed to pay a part of his salary.

In evidence of his allegations Kukanos has enclosed audio recordings of his talks with KAMAZ management, which he had made with his voice recorder.

«As soon as I terminated my contract with KAMAZ, I decided to appeal to the Russian football authorities. I also had recorded my conversations with the club management, because there’s no other way to deal with them. You can’t make them answerable without strong evidence.

There were clubs wishing to hire me, other teams and coaches had contacted KAMAZ, but there they were told that Alexander Kukanos is crap both as a player and as a person. Naturally, nobody wanted to sign me after such a reference,» Kukanos told in his interview to Kommesant.

«KAMAZ representatives used all methods and all loopholes to avoid paying me. I almost ran out of money for living. Moreover, they refused to terminate my contract by mutual agreement hoping to obtain money for me to the bitter end.

«They finally let me go, when there were only ten days left to the end of the player registration period and all the teams had already shaped their squads. I intend to fight till the end. The people from KAMAZ have humiliated me in different ways, and I want them to be punished justly.»

On April 4 the player addressed the Russian FA president Sergey Fursenko asking him to refer his case to the Ethics Committee. However, Fursenko didn’t find any ethical violations in it and charged Igor Yefremov (president of FNL, organization administrating the second tier of Russian football, where both KAMAZ and Baltika play) to examine the case.