As if the West In­dies Crick­et Board (WICB) was not in enough trou­ble los­ing le­gal mat­ters left, right and cen­tre, they now have cre­at­ed a big­ger prob­lem by is­su­ing a press re­lease con­demn­ing the ar­bi­tra­tor, Se­nior Coun­sel Seenath Jairam. The Guardian has been able to ob­tain a let­ter which in­forms that the learned coun­sel has writ­ten to the re­gion­al crick­et body, seek­ing a re­trac­tion of their com­ments and an apol­o­gy, and if not forth­com­ing, face the pos­si­bil­i­ty of le­gal ac­tion. In re­sponse to the re­gion­al body los­ing the ar­bi­tra­tion mat­ter to bats­man Ramnaresh Sar­wan, who was award­ed $1m by the ar­bi­tra­tor, the WICB in a press re­lease re­spond­ed with the fol­low­ing: "Sar­wan pre­sent­ed his ver­sion of the events as his ev­i­dence to the ar­bi­tra­tor but the ar­bi­tra­tor did not al­low WICB coun­sel to cross-ex­am­ine Sar­wan on these mat­ters nor did the ar­bi­tra­tor seek to find any ev­i­dence of the claims made by Sar­wan.

"The ar­bi­tra­tor sim­ply ac­cept­ed WIPA's and Sar­wan's ver­sion of ev­i­dence as true de­spite e-mails and let­ters which could have been pro­vid­ed to show con­trary to the claims," the re­lease not­ed.

The WICB re­lease fur­ther stat­ed: "Nei­ther WIPA nor Sar­wan was able to show the ar­bi­tra­tor any ev­i­dence of any in­struc­tion by any WICB of­fi­cer to any se­lec­tor re­lat­ing to se­lec­tion of Sar­wan but nev­er­the­less stat­ed such as a mat­ter of fact."

The WICB re­lease end­ed by say­ing that it did not wish to be en­gaged in un­help­ful sus­tained le­gal bat­tles with play­ers and in this in­stance had agreed to set­tle even though the board had been ad­vised that the ar­bi­tra­tor's rul­ing was flawed. In SC Jairam's let­ter to the WICB, he in­di­cates that in the course of the ar­bi­tra­tion he adopt­ed a pro­ce­dure which per­mit­ted the par­ties to call those wit­ness­es and pro­duce such ev­i­dence as they con­sid­ered ap­pro­pri­ate to prove the al­le­ga­tions in sup­port of their case and con­sis­tent with that ap­proach he al­so per­mit­ted each par­ty am­ple op­por­tu­ni­ty to cross-ex­am­ine the oth­ers wit­ness­es. The let­ter fur­ther states that at no time dur­ing the hear­ing or af­ter the ar­bi­tra­tion did ei­ther par­ty or their coun­sel make any com­plaint with re­spect to his con­duct of the ar­bi­tra­tion. "It is un­for­tu­nate that the WICB has cho­sen to make this pub­lic but it is a mat­ter of record that both par­ties were giv­en free rein to ad­duce all ev­i­dence as they saw it fit be­fore the ar­bi­tra­tor," the let­ter con­tin­ued. "The WICB hav­ing elect­ed not to ad­duce ev­i­dence on any con­ver­sa­tion in­volv­ing Dr Hi­laire, ought not now to pub­licly im­pugn the ar­bi­tra­tion process on the ba­sis of their own fail­ure to ad­duce this ev­i­dence. It is al­so a mat­ter of record that the WICB was giv­en free rein to cross-ex­am­ine wit­ness­es, in­clud­ing Sar­wan, on all mat­ters up­on which they saw fit. "No ap­pli­ca­tion for cross-ex­am­i­na­tion or ques­tion was posed or sought to be posed to Sar­wan on any is­sue now com­plained of. Again, any and all re­spon­si­bil­i­ty for this must lie at the feet of the WICB. As a dis­ap­point­ed par­ty, the WICB is free to cri­tique the award that was de­liv­ered but it is un­ac­cept­able to mis­rep­re­sent the events which tran­spired dur­ing the ac­tu­al ar­bi­tra­tion. "It is a com­plete un­truth to say that the ar­bi­tra­tor did not al­low WICB coun­sel to cross-ex­am­ine Sar­wan on the mat­ters high­light­ed in the press re­lease."