The Pakistan Cricket Board has accused the Board of Control for Cricket in India of backtracking on their promise to play a bilateral series and alleged that they incurred losses up to $200 million (Rs 1,340 crore).
India and Pakistan entered a bilateral agreement in 2014, but the relations between the rival countries turned sour last year. Former BCCI chief Anurag Thakur ruled out any India-Pakistan ties following the Uri attack in 2016, and even urged the International Cricket Council to refrain from clubbing the two sides in the same group during multi-nation tournaments.
PCB chairman Shahrayar Khan accused the Indian board of not honouring a legal agreement between them. “I informed the BCCI representative at the ICC meeting recently that PCB had incurred losses of around $200 million because of India’s refusal to play us and these losses were mounting as the BCCI was not even honouring a legal agreement to play bilateral series between 2015 and 2023,” Khan was quoted as saying in a PTI report.
He went to add that the BCCI failed to honour the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) the two organisations had signed. “I told him that they should have thought about their government before signing the MoU which is a legal agreement as per our lawyers,” Khan added.
Khan spoke about an ICC meeting where he had addressed the matter with a BCCI representative. “I told him that India had denied us two home series, the losses of which were around $200 million,” Khan said.
The PCB chief also pointed out that despite dismantling the ‘Big Three’ system of governance, India would continue to pocket a lion’s share of the revenue. “Even under the new draft constitution, India gets around 16% share of all ICC earnings, which is higher compared to other boards. Under the Big Three formula, India, Australia and England were taking home more than 50% of the revenues with other boards getting far less.”
“It was not an equitable system of revenue distribution and we only agreed to it because India agreed to sign the MoU and play six bilateral series with us, which would have allowed us to get financially stronger,” Khan said.