‘Report unfair'

Lord Condon's report on match-fixing was described by West Indies Cricket Board (WICB) president Pat Rousseau yesterday as grossly unfair to Brian Lara and other players still facing unsubstantiated allegations by Indian bookmaker M.K. Gupta.

We're still in an area where we get a lot of talk and very little evidence, Rousseau said of Condon's report that covered the work of his special anti-corruption unit that was set up by the International Council (ICC) last July.

I can't deal with allegations by a guy who is an illegal bookmaker and who nobody can produce to give evidence, he said. That is grossly unfair to the people involved.

Condon, one-time head of London's Metropolitan Police, presented the report to the ICC last week. Rousseau said he studied it last weekend and would send his comments on it to the ICC.

Gupta's accusations against West Indies star batsman Lara, Alec Stewart of England, Mark Waugh of Australia, Martin Crowe of New Zealand and Aravinda deSilva and Arjuna Ranatunga of Sri Lanka in India's Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) report last year have still not been proven.

The people against whom there is solid evidence have all been dealt with, sentenced, suspended or banned, Rousseau said.

You would have thought that by now Condon's team would either have got hard evidence against the others or, having not got it, would have cleared them.

Former Test captains Hansie Cronje and Mohammed Azharuddin have been banned for life by their respective boards after they were named by Gupta in the CBI report. Salim Malik of Pakistan got a similar penalty from his board following investigations by Judge Mohammed Qayyum.

Rousseau pointed out that the WICB had appointed Queen's Counsel Elliott Mottley, the former attorney-general of Barbados and Bermuda, to inquire into Gupta's allegations that Lara received around US$40 0000 to under-perform in two One-Day Internationals in India in 1994.

Mottley still has to meet with Lara, but if he comes back and reports that there is no basis for it (the allegations), then that's the end of it, he said.

Rousseau was also at odds with Condon over the report's recommendations for the restructuring of the ICC. I didn't think that was his job, he said. We have a committee doing that right now.