The West In­dies Play­ers' As­so­ci­a­tion (WIPA) has con­demned a press re­lease sent out by the West In­dies Crick­et Board on Wednes­day, crit­i­cis­ing the rul­ing of ar­bi­tra­tor Seenath Jairam SC on the award of $1 mil­lion to crick­eter Ramnaresh Sar­wan.

The full text fol­lows: "The in­ter­pre­ta­tion by the WICB in a re­lease is­sued Wednes­day, Sep­tem­ber 12, 2012, of the Ar­bi­tra­tion of the Sar­wan mat­ter does not deal with the full facts. The Ar­bi­tra­tion Rul­ing is the on­ly doc­u­ment with the full facts and it is here­by pre­sent­ed.

Fact 1: The WICB wish­es to premise the pre­sen­ta­tion of the facts on two clear points as fol­lows:

The WICB refers to what it calls "two clear points," the first of which is to de­scribe the rul­ing by the Ho­n­ourable Seenath Jairam S.C. as flawed. While Mr Jairam may wish to deal with this mat­ter him­self, and un­doubt­ed­ly is ful­ly com­pe­tent to do so, WIPA re­spects the process agreed to by the par­ties and strong­ly dis­as­so­ci­ates it­self from any crit­i­cism made by the WICB of the judg­ment. It should be not­ed that it was the WICB rec­om­mend­ed and pro­posed Mr. Jairam to be the sole ar­bi­tra­tor with which WIPA con­curred.

Fact Two: The WICB made re­peat­ed at­tempts to dis­cuss the mat­ter with Mr. Sar­wan and WIPA.

The is­sue was first raised in Jan­u­ary 2010 and the ar­bi­tra­tion took place in Sep­tem­ber 2011. The Ar­bi­tra­tor's Rul­ing high­light­ed ev­i­dence that the WICB's CEO re­fused to fol­low the dis­pute res­o­lu­tion mech­a­nism as out­lined in the Col­lec­tive Bar­gain­ing Agree­ment (CBA) which re­quires the Par­ties to have good faith ne­go­ti­a­tions, that it re­fused me­di­a­tion as an op­tion and claimed that doc­u­ments were sub­mit­ted to the Dis­pute Res­o­lu­tion Cen­tre of Trinidad and Trinidad when in fact none were sub­mit­ted. The mat­ter was then re­ferred to the next stage which is ar­bi­tra­tion. Mr Sar­wan was the per­son who re­quest­ed a meet­ing on the mat­ter by way of let­ter in Jan­u­ary 21, 2010 sent by WIPA on his be­half. To date, the WICB has not re­spond­ed to this let­ter.

Fact Three: At no time did the WICB Chief Ex­ec­u­tive Of­fi­cer, Dr Ernest Hi­laire or any oth­er of­fi­cer of the Board threat­en Mr Sar­wan in any man­ner.

Ev­i­dence giv­en at the hear­ing in chief and un­der cross ex­am­i­na­tion as­serts oth­er­wise.

Fact Four: At no time did the WICB CEO or any oth­er of­fi­cer of the Board in­struct any se­lec­tor on any course of ac­tion to be tak­en in re­la­tion to the se­lec­tion of any West In­dies team.

In a re­lease dat­ed Sep­tem­ber 2, 2010, which the Se­lec­tion Com­mit­tee is­sued cit­ing rea­sons for the non-se­lec­tion of Mr Sar­wan. The Se­lec­tion Com­mit­tee stat­ed: "The team man­age­ment, se­lec­tion com­mit­tee and the WICB are con­cerned about Sar­wan's ex­treme­ly in­dif­fer­ent at­ti­tude and spo­radic ap­proach to­wards fit­ness, par­tic­u­lar­ly in re­cent years," read a state­ment re­leased by the board. The Ar­bi­tra­tor found that the se­lec­tion process was not fair and trans­par­ent.

Fact Five: The Se­lec­tion Com­mit­tee is guid­ed by re­ports of the WICB Med­ical Pan­el and Team Phys­io­ther­a­pist.

On Jan­u­ary 21, 2011, WIPA wrote the WICB on be­half of Mr Sar­wan ask­ing for any re­ports which sup­port Hi­laire's al­le­ga­tions about Mr Sar­wan's fit­ness and at­ti­tude. Hi­laire did not pro­vide the in­for­ma­tion re­quest­ed to WIPA or at the hear­ing. More­over, the un­con­test­ed ev­i­dence at the hear­ing showed that Sar­wan un­der­went a fit­ness test in March 2010 and that the re­port of the train­er and phys­io­ther­a­pist was favourable.

Fact Six: Dr Hi­laire sent a let­ter to Mr. Sar­wan based on the tour re­port fol­low­ing the West In­dies Tour to Aus­tralia 2009.

No doc­u­men­ta­tion to sup­port the claims made by Hi­laire has ever been pro­vid­ed.

Fact Sev­en: Mr. Sar­wan had a tele­phone con­ver­sa­tion with Dr Hi­laire re­lat­ing to the let­ter.

Mr Sar­wan, in that tele­phone con­ver­sa­tion con­test­ed that he was un­fit and ar­gued that the Team Phys­io­ther­a­pist and Fit­ness Train­er did not like him. Dr. Hi­laire de­fend­ed the pro­fes­sion­al­ism of the staff. Mr. Sar­wan was told that he would need to sat­is­fy Team Man­age­ment that he was suf­fi­cient­ly fit to play. WIPA will not stand aside and al­low a fair re­sult in favour of one of its mem­bers be tar­nished by un­wise ut­ter­ances."