Vin­ode Mam­chan

Dur­ing the cur­rent tri­al be­tween the West In­dies Crick­et Board (WICB) and the West In­dies Play­ers As­so­ci­a­tion (WIPA) be­fore Jus­tice Ricky Rahim in Trinidad, the play­ers' body raised a po­ten­tial­ly se­ri­ous le­gal is­sue.

WIPA claimed that the WICB had di­vert­ed and with­held pay­ments from the play­ers meant to go to their pen­sion or "prov­i­dent" fund and with­held its own con­tri­bu­tion to the fund, us­ing the mon­ey to cov­er the board's on­go­ing ex­pen­di­ture.

For­mer cor­po­rate sec­re­tary of the West In­dies Crick­et Board An­tho­ny Deyal con­firmed this dur­ing the tri­al. Deyal al­so ad­mit­ted it had pos­si­ble se­ri­ous crim­i­nal con­se­quences.

It is un­der­stood that WIPA plans to re­port this mat­ter to the fraud squad. Mean­while, the West In­dies Crick­et As­so­ci­a­tion (WIPA) will bid to make it 16 for and none against when Jus­tice Rahim de­liv­ers his judg­ment on the fate of the present col­lec­tive bar­gain­ing agree­ment (CBA) be­tween WIPA and the WICB on Feb­ru­ary 13.

In a mat­ter which start­ed be­fore Jus­tice Rahim in the T&T High Court on Oc­to­ber 15, WIPA ar­gued that it was al­ways ac­cept­ed that agree­ments could be changed on­ly by the mu­tu­al con­sent of the two par­ties.

WIPA quot­ed from the min­utes of the ini­tial meet­ing with the WICB in April 2003, when the WICB's pres­i­dent at the time, Wes­ley Hall, in­di­cat­ed that he want­ed a re­la­tion­ship found­ed on sound in­dus­tri­al-re­la­tions prin­ci­ples which no sub­se­quent board could uni­lat­er­al­ly ter­mi­nate.

Hall sub­se­quent­ly re­it­er­at­ed this po­si­tion in an ad­dress to the T&T Crick­et Board (TTCB) on Sep­tem­ber 29, 2012.

The WICB ar­gued that such an agree­ment did not make sound busi­ness sense and that there were no con­tracts in per­pe­tu­ity.

The main WIPA wit­ness, for­mer pres­i­dent and CEO Di­nanath Ram­nar­ine, sup­port­ed WIPA's con­tention that the WICB al­ways rep­re­sent­ed to WIPA that the agree­ment would not be uni­lat­er­al­ly ter­mi­nat­ed be­cause of the plain and lit­er­al mean­ing of the agree­ments, and that in the event of a dis­pute aris­ing out or in re­la­tion to the agree­ments, the dis­pute-res­o­lu­tion mech­a­nism was ca­pa­ble of han­dling any dis­pute that arose be­tween the par­ties.

This process was used in the Clause 5 mat­ter. Clause 5 which was framed by the In­ter­na­tion­al Crick­et Coun­cil (ICC) and the Fed­er­a­tion of In­ter­na­tion­al Crick­et As­so­ci­a­tions (FI­CA) refers to the in­tel­lec­tu­al prop­er­ties and im­age rights of the play­ers.

The process was al­so used in sev­er­al oth­er mat­ters in­clud­ing most re­cent­ly the Ramnaresh Sar­wan, Nar­ins­ingh De­onar­ine and Lendl Sim­mons is­sues. The WICB on those oc­ca­sions were found guilty of breach­ing the con­tract and fail­ure to ad­here to the ap­praisal process and act­ed on mak­ing wrong­ful dis­ci­pli­nary al­le­ga­tions and not giv­ing the play­ers a chance to be heard.

The process was used to show that the deal­ings of the board was not fair and trans­par­ent and was a breach of nat­ur­al jus­tice.

Mean­while, it has been re­port­ed that the main WICB wit­ness, CFO Bar­ry Thomas, was with­drawn and Dr Ernest Hi­laire-who was not in­volved in the WICB un­til 2009, six years af­ter the dis­cus­sions start­ed and four years af­ter the agree­ment came in­to ef­fect-was the soli­tary wit­ness on be­half of the WICB.

Much of Hi­laire's tes­ti­mo­ny was de­pen­dent on the state­ment of Thomas, who did not make him­self avail­able for cross-ex­am­i­na­tion.