Who will pay the GCC?

The 2003 cricket World Cup was as much about political controversy as about sport - and while the cricket is long over, the boardroom warfare lingers on. It was inevitable that the Global Cricket Corporation (GCC) would file for reparations at some point or the other. They paid US$550 million for the event, and much of what was promised to them was not delivered. The knotty issue that needs to be resolved is: who should pay up?

Take the ICC player contracts, for example, which the Indian players refused to endorse. The ICC, to wangle that juicy premium from the GCC, had promised what did not belong to them in the first place: the players' commercial rights. The contracts amounted to a restraint of trade, and the players, rightly, refused to sign them.

So should the ICC be held liable for promising the GCC what it did not own? The ICC's position is that the onus for delivery shifted to the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) when they signed the Participation Nations Agreement (PNA) with the ICC, effectively promising to deliver to the ICC what the ICC had promised to the GCC. Even if the BCCI claimed that these contracts were illegal, they had already taken the onus of that illegality upon themselves.

Or had they? Jagmohan Dalmiya, in a recent interview to Wisden Asia Cricket, said that the BCCI had signed the PNA with a caveat registering their objection to the controversial clauses in question. That the ICC accepted the PNA with the caveat, and did not bar India from playing in the World Cup, implies an acceptance of the BCCI's position. The BCCI could argue that to then withhold the their World Cup guarantee money of approximately US$9 million, and to threaten them with reparation, is unfair.

Much of the tension in the relations between the BCCI and the ICC came from the personal animus between Jagmohan Dalmiya and the two Malcolms who run the ICC, Speed and Gray. With Ehsan Mani, a friend of Dalmiya, taking over at the ICC soon, it would not be unreasonable to expect the two organisations to work out a compromise and begin speaking with one voice. But just how will they tackle GCC's reparation claim?

Perhaps they will shift the focus to England and New Zealand. The ICC has a fairly watertight case against them: both countries, in the PNA, agreed to play at the venues concerned. Both backed out of a game each for reasons of security. The matches that did take place in Zimbabwe and Kenya were unmarred by any violence, and it will be difficult for England and New Zealand to justify their forfeitures. Their chances at the World Cup were affected by it; so may their finances, now.