CHENNAI: His first objective accomplished, Cricket Association of Bihar (CAB) secretary Aditya Verma, also the petitioner in the IPL spot-fixing scandal, is now gunning for the ouster of N Srinivasan from the International Cricket Council, whose chairman he is.
“It’s BCCI’s moral responsibility to do that. It’s because of Srinivasan’s greed for power that the entire fixing scandal got murkier. How can such a man head the ICC? They should call for a special general meeting and throw him out. He should also be banned from cricket administration. For the good of Indian cricket, they should do it as early as possible,” Verma told Express.
Verma threatens to move court if the Board of Control for Cricket in India fails to withdraw Srinivasan from ICC. “If they continue to let go things as they are now, I won’t have any hesitation to move court against BCCI. Him continuing as the head of ICC will affect the credibility of the body. The BCCI should have done this much earlier,” threatened Verma, whose petition in the Bombay High Court claiming discrepancy in the findings of the IPL governing council’s independent probe was the turning point of the fiasco.
Srinivasan became ICC’s first chairman after the shake-up in June 2014 and has one more year to complete his tenure. However, Srinivasan himself is adamantly clinging onto his post. “I am not associated with CSK. It (Lodha panel’s verdict) has nothing to do with me, why should I step down?” he was quoted as saying after the committee’s denouement on Tuesday. But it seems the clamour for his stepping down will gather steam in the coming days despite reports that he had called truce with some of the top members of the ruling BCCI regime.
Meanwhile, leading lawyer Rahul Mehra observed that though the deposed franchises have the provision to appeal for leniency to the Supreme Court, it wouldn’t prove beneficial. “Technically speaking, they can. But there wouldn’t be much of an outcome, unless they find some illegality in the verdict, which I think there isn’t any. The verdict is more or less conclusive with little apparent loopholes. But the law of the land doesn’t prevent anybody from appealing and for the sake of it, they can,” he elaborated.
That the order passed by the committee is final is written in the Lodha panel report to the SC. “The order passed by the committee shall be final and binding upon BCCI and the parties concerned subject to the right of the aggrieved party seeking (to) redress in appropriate judicial proceedings in accordance with law,” it states.