Selvey M: Javed Burki promises `swift action` (21 Feb 95)

Pakistan to act over bribes;

Test board chief Javed Burki promises `swift action` after studying Australians` sworn affidavits. Mike Selvey reports from Lord`s.

PAKISTAN officials were yesterday confronted with the first hard evidence to back up allegations of bribery and matchthrowing involving their national side. They promised to act swiftly.

Javed Burki, a former Pakistan Test captain and now chairman of the ad hoc committee of the Board of Control for Cricket in Pakistan, yesterday visited the International Cricket Council HQ at Lord`s and was shown sworn affidavits from, among others, the Australian spinners Shane Warne and Tim May and the batsman Mark Waugh.

Each alleges that he was approached during Australia`s tour of Pakistan last winter. An Australian newspaper implicated Salim Malik, Pakistan`s current captain, as intermediary. Salim, on tour with his side in Zimbabwe and due back in Pakistan shortly, has vehemently denied the charge.

Speaking yesterday at Lord`s, the ICC`s chief executive David Richards said that, having seen the evidence collected thus far, Burki had promised to take the matter further.

"I have provided Mr Burki with a copy of the statements made by several Australian players after the 1994 tour of Pakistan," Richards said. "He agreed that the allegations were most serious and he was confident that the BCCP would take swift action on them."

Richards declined to name any of the alleged offenders. "ICC`s legal advice is that I am unable to reveal the contents of those statements nor to comment on the identity of any person referred to therein."

Yet his statement confirms that after more than a week of innuendo, allegations, counter-allegations and flat denials the affair has moved forward into the realms of an official investigation by Pakistani officials, who are offended that they were not consulted by the Australian Cricket Board in the first place.

"Do they think we are all crooks?" was Burki`s reaction only a few days ago. "Why did they have to wait five months?"

The first whiff of scandal came when an Australian cricket writer broke the story that Warne and May, so they said, had been offered around pounds 30,000 each to perform badly during the first Test match in Lahore last October.

Pakistan won the match by one wicket, seen home by a lastwicket stand of 57 during which the Australian wicketkeeper Ian Healy missed a stumping. Mark Waugh subsequently revealed that he received regular night-time `phone calls offering him even more - as much as pounds 75,000 - if he batted badly during the series.

The ball was in motion. These stories were followed swiftly by others suggesting that the former Australian captain Allan Border had been approached on the 1993 tour of England and offered pounds 500,000 to throw the third Test match in Birmingham.

The former Pakistan Test player Mushtaq Mohammed has since admitted that he might have been the person concerned but that he had merely been offering Border a hypothetical situation. It was, he said, a joke. Border was not amused.

Most recent allegations have come from yet another former Pakistan player Sarfraz Nawaz. Now a government official, he claims not only that Pakistanis were bribed to throw a one-day international against England at Nottingham in 1992 but that bribery had been commonplace over the past 14 years and that players both past and present might be prepared to testify. Yesterday the official search for the truth began.

Source :: The Guardian