Court halts perjury moves against Pawar

New Delhi: India’s Supreme Court on Friday stopped criminal proceedings against the country’s top cricket officials on perjury charges. The Calcutta High Court had last month ordered police to file the charges against six officials of the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) in a case linked to ex-president Jagmohan Dalmiya. The officials were alleged to have given false evidence against Dalmiya, a former head of the International Cricket Council (ICC), who was expelled from the BCCI in 2006 accused of financial irregularities. But the Supreme Court stayed proceedings after accepting the officials’ plea that the Calcutta High Court had not heard their side of the case before passing judgement. The officials included Sharad Pawar, who takes over as ICC president in 2010, his successor as BCCI chief Shashank Manohar, and former and present secretaries Niranjan Shah and N. Srinivasan. The other two were BCCI vice-president Chirayu Amin and chief administrative officer Ratnakar Shetty. The BCCI had argued in the Calcutta High Court that Dalmiya was expelled under new rules framed by it and that those rules were properly registered. Dalmiya, however, filed another case against the BCCI that the rules had not been registered as claimed, and therefore his expulsion was invalid. The court ruled that the six officials had submitted a false affidavit, which amounted to perjury. Dalmiya, who heads the Cricket Association of Bengal, ruled the BCCI for more than a decade before being overthrown by the Pawar faction in a bitter election in 2005. The BCCI, one of the richest cricket bodies in the world, generated income of $205m in 2007-08.

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