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Sports Minister to meet former ex-co on May 12
Sports Minister Naveen Dissanayake will meet the now dismissed Sri Lanka Cricket executive committee on May 12 at 2.00pm at the Sports Ministry to hear its side of the story, SLC’s former senior vice President Mohan de Silva.
“We sent him a letter stating our side of the story and the majority of the former executive committee and the stakeholders are backing us. Now the minister has responded to our request,” de Silva said.
He said it was unfair to brand the former committee as corrupt. “Even the Prime Minister has gone on record saying the reason for installing the Interim Committee was that it contained corrupt officials. But, the allegation centred on the building of the stadiums, which happened many years before we took over the Lankan cricket body. De Silva said a committee set up to probe the irregularities had concluded that the only allegation was the awarding of the local TV rights to CSN. “But, that too occurred prior to our time at the SLC. Then, how could they justify the setting up of this Interim Committee?”
“In our letter we have stated that if anyone is found guilty, he should be taken to task and we on our part have stated that the SLC executive committee as a responsible body would blacklist that person so that he could not be a part of the cricket administration in the future” de Silva added.He said that during their tenure as executive committee members, Sri Lanka’s cricket had many achievements which included the Asia Cup, The World T-20 title and Sri Lanka first Test series win against England in England. He also claimed that during that time Sri Lanka became number one in T-20 segment in World Cricket, Number two in ODIs and Number 3 in the Test segment in ICC rankings.
“During that time even our financial status became very healthy and we were planning to erase all debts by the end of this year,” he said.