Kaneria wants open hearing for appeal against life-ban – Cricket News Update
Steven Hourigan, acting lawyer for out-of-favour Pakistani leg-spinner http://www.senore.com/Cricket/England-c749 and Wales Cricket Board,
in order to ensure a fair trial.
Hourigan went on to point out that the board had adopted a biased outlook during the disciplinary hearing which took place earlier this month in regards to the spot-fixing charges faced by Mervyn Westfield and Kaneria during their stint with County club
Essex, adding that the verdict would not have ended in a life-ban for his client if the hearing had been fair.
“We lost a hearing where it was pre-determined what the result was going to be,” he said. “We're going to have an appeal. What we want is an independent observer to sit in and listen to the evidence ... a fair hearing in front of an independent panel.”
Kaneria and Westfield were both arrested on charges of spot-fixing in 2010 by the http://www.senore.com/Cricket/Essex-c783 police, but the former was released owing to insufficient evidence. Westfield, however, was tried and sentenced earlier this year to four months in prison, after it was
revealed that he had accepted 6000 pounds in exchange for deliberately conceding a set amount of runs during the first over of a match against http://www.senore.com/Cricket/Durham-c782 in September 2009.
Westfield named Kaneria as the middleman who had set up the deal – a charge which Kaneria vehemently denied. Following Westfield’s early release, the ECB summoned both players to a disciplinary hearing, where Kaneria was handed a life-ban from the sport,
while Westfield was banned for 5 years.
Following the hearing, Kaneria has 14 days before the ECB announces the final verdict, during which an appeal can be lodged – a course of action which the cricketer intends to take, with an appeal at the Court of Arbitration for Sport also under consideration.
Elaborating on the unjust nature of the ECB hearing, Hourigan went on to point out that it served the board’s interests to pin the entire incident on Kaneria – an easy target, seeing as he was outsider from http://www.senore.com/Cricket/Pakistan-c755, who could easily be labelled a corrupting
influence.
“It's been suggested that what the ECB wanted to do and needed to do was, in order to present English cricket as being clean, that this one incident of corruption was caused by a foreign player coming to the UK and corrupting a young, English player,” he
said.
The ECB has declined to comment on the request for an open hearing, until an official appeal is lodged.
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