Cricket Needs Comprehensive Governance Reforms Not A Concentration Of Power: Transparency International

January 29, 2014

Transparency International (TI) chapters from nine cricket-playing countries, including Australia, India and United Kingdom, express serious concern at proposed reform of the International Cricket Council (ICC)  and call on the ICC to publish a formal response to the Woolf Report and meanwhile halt any other significant governance reforms.

In the coming week, the ICC will be discussing proposals to reform the governance of world cricket.  These proposals substantially depart from the principles of good governance and democratic participation, and appear not to address the risks of corruption within the game of cricket.

For instance: many member countries are effectively dis-enfranchised; there remains a worrying lack of transparency in many areas; there is no clarity on how the ICC aims to assess and mitigate corruption risk at an administrative level; there is no provision for independent Board representation; and the intention to entrench a privileged position for “The Big Three” appears to be an abuse of entrusted power for private gain, giving them disproportionate, unaccountable and unchallengeable authority on a wide variety of constitutional, personnel, integrity, ethics, development and nomination matters.

As recently as 2011, the ICC itself commissioned Lord Woolf to submit a report on the governance of world cricket.  The report was delivered in 2012.  It suggested a series of reforms to make cricket’s governance more transparent and better equipped to oversee a global sport. Since then, there has been no formal response from the ICC to the Woolf recommendations.  The current proposals bear little or no relation to the principles outlined in the Woolf report, which in itself only represented standard corporate governance practice in many parts of the world.  The proposals are notable for ignoring other wider indicators of good governance such as accountability, transparency, participation, consensus, equity and inclusiveness.

Transparency International (TI), the global anti-corruption organisation, made an initial submission to Lord Woolf and thereafter published its own report on cricket’s governance challenges in 2013, entitled Fair Play. TI expressed concern that the risk of corruption in cricket is rising, and that little seems to be done to address those risks.  The exception to this is in the area of match-fixing and spot-fixing.  Yet cricket’s governance problems and corruption risks go far beyond the on-field players, and include officials, administrators and sponsors. The current reform proposal makes no mention of how these salient issues will be addressed to ensure the future growth of the sport.                                    Read More