Be it a private limited company, a trust, a not-for-profit organisation, a government-funded public sector company, or some obscure company registered in a tax haven. If you found out an unknown hand has siphoned off US$2.5m – or probably more – from your account, what would you do?
At the very least, set up an investigation/inquiry committee within the organisation to find out how and why it happened.
But maybe not if you’re the International Cricket Council (ICC). In January this year, it first came to light how the ICC became a ‘victim’ of phishing in the United States.
The cricket body was cheated in a scam not once, not twice, but four times and quite surprisingly, while this happened, the ICC had no clue.
Vaguely put, some scamsters in the United States acted as a vendor of the ICC and emailed their Chief Financial Officer (CFO) for payments from an email ID similar to the ICC’s. And yes, the payments were cleared.
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A loss of $2.5 million is not a small one. That kind of money is equivalent to what four to five associate member countries earn annually from the ICC.
Now, what’s not clear is this: Has the ICC appointed or approached anyone to look into the matter? CricketNext reached out to the ICC asking whether an external or internal agency was appointed to look into the phishing incidents but didn’t get a response yet. The story will be updated the moment they respond.
Be it the case of a female staffer accusing the head of HR and Anti-Corruption Unit of harassment, be it another investigation commissioned by a former CEO coming to light or be it questions on ICC’s half-baked plans to conduct the World Cup in America, the governing body has refused to provide answers.
The million-dollar ‘cultural review’
In 2021, the ICC roped in UK-based PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PWC) for a cultural review of the organisation. PWC reportedly charged a whopping US$ one million to conduct a review, and its outcome resulted in one of the costliest terminations in the sports industry ever.
Then CEO Manu Sawhney was sacked based on the “findings of the PWC report” and was the only ICC employee who lost his job as a result of the outcome of the report. To date, no other development has taken place in the ICC on the basis of the PWC-UK report – which, it is understood, was commissioned as part of a plan between a top ICC official and a prominent cricket administrator from the United Kingdom.
“No one knows what happened with the cultural review as the report never made to any table for a discussion. What’s also shocking is nobody wants to even ask what happened to it,” say those tracking developments.
Out-of-turn promotions
The ICC has indulged in multiple out-of-turn promotions to one employee, known to be close to the ‘higher-ups’ at the cost of ignoring another employee who happens to be a senior and far more efficient.
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While one Asian employee hasn’t been promoted for more than five years, the “out of turn” promotion of another employee – known to be close to top ICC officials – has irked many. Surprisingly, none of the Asian board member representatives have raised the question with ICC’s HR department.
“The ICC likes to talk about equality, etc., but in the end, its internal actions are so unsavoury. Everyone in the ICC talks about it but there has been complete silence,” says an insider close to developments.
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