Nyoka's skipped key issues - Gauteng board

The Gauteng Cricket Board (GCB) has come out strongly in response to Cricket South Africa president Mtutuzeli Nyoka's statement on the issue of mismanagement of the 2009 IPL, saying he did not touch upon several key issues raised by the GCB. It also said there were no grounds for it to apologise to the BCCI and IPL, as sought by Nyoka, as it had not referred to either body in its allegations.

The GCB statement said it would formally reply to Nyoka's statement after it received a response from the board's Audit and Risk Committee to a letter sent on June 4.

"In that letter we stated that, on the basis of information that was known to us and available to us at that time, we believed that CSA had been exposed to material financial risk by the manner in which CSA had conducted contractual negotiations with the IPL," Barry Skjoldhammer, the GCB chairman, said in a statement.

Nyoka's statement, he said, did not address issues raised by the GCB's letter to the Audit and Risk Committee such as CSA's refusal to "to make details of its contract with the IPL known to GCB" and its non-participation "in negotiations between GCB and the IPL, notwithstanding that CSA was the only party with knowledge of the contract under which the IPL claimed to have acquired rights from CSA over the Wanderers Stadium, all commercial and media rights to which are controlled by GCB."

The Wanderers stadium in Johannesburg was suspended from holding international matches under the auspices of CSA and the national board said the ban would be lifted only after the GCB apologised for its allegations and accepted the terms and conditions for hosting games. The GCB, however, said it had made no reference to the BCCI or made any "any evaluation of or comment on the IPL's behaviour" in their letter.

The GCB and CSA had several differences over the running of the IPL; the issues ranged from the sharing of VIP suites to the price of alcohol. At one point there was a doubt that the semi-finals and final would be held at the Wanderers as scheduled and after the tournament the GCB investigated the possibility of counterfeit tickets being sold at the final.

Skjoldhammer's statement said the GCB had been trying to negotiate the terms and conditions for hosting matches at the Wanderers for seven years but CSA had "persistently declined or failed to engage GCB in any form of direct discussions". He added that if the GCB accepted the terms and conditions, in their current form, CSA was trying to impose, it would "destroy the financial viability" of the Wanderers Stadium.

"The proposed CSA model would also undermine GCB's viability as a provincial cricket union that serves the interests of amateur cricket through hundreds of club league teams and many thousands of players, as well as hundreds of schools and development programmes reaching many thousand children," the GCB statement said. It concluded by saying that it was not in the interests of anyone for Wanderers to be stripped of its international status and the board would "exercise its rights as an affiliated member of CSA to ensure that CSA observes its own corporate governance procedures relative to such decisions."