Mumbai: Former BCCI President Shashank Manohar today rued that there was no one in the Board to take on N Srinivasan who is facing the heat over the IPL spot-fixing and betting scandal.
Srinivasan, who had ignored repeated calls for his resignation, has been stripped of his presidential powers by the Supreme Court till he is cleared of alleged wrongdoings in the scandal.
“The Board lacks leaders to take on Srinivasan who is shamelessly and stubbornly sticking to his chair. Nothing has moved in the last one year. The outbreak of the scandal happened in May 2013 and we are currently in April 2014,” Manohar told PTI from Nagpur.
Manohar wants someone in the cricket administration to get up and raise the issue at the Emergent Working Committee meeting which has been convened on April 20 at the Board's headquarters here.
“In BCCI, the powers (related to Board functioning) are vested with the Working Committee and the General Body, and not with the President,” he said.
Asked whether there was a need to change the Board's Constitution in the wake of Srinivasan's stubbornness, Manohar said “no”.
“You need 3/4th majority to remove someone and that means 24 out of 31 votes. When (former IPL chief) Lalit Modi was removed (and banned for life in 2010) all he needed (to escape the ban) was eight votes which he did not have,” he stated. Manohar, Srinivasan's immediate predecessor, refused to lay the blame on the cash-rich IPL for BCCI's current woes. “Just because of one minus point (spot-fixing scandal) you cannot blame the tournament which has a lot of plus points. It has enabled BCCI to pay former players and grant more money to the state associations for infrastructure developments,” he maintained.
