Cricket South Africa (CSA) chief executive Gerald Majola was suspended on Saturday.
The decision was taken by CSA’s board of directors during a meeting in Johannesburg.
This was after a ministerial inquiry, headed by retired judge Chris Nicholson, found the board had failed to take appropriate action against Majola for alleged financial misconduct.
Nicholson recommended that Majola be suspended for 180 days pending the conclusion of a disciplinary inquiry and that the board should be restructured and downsized to consist of a majority of independent, professionally skilled, non-executive directors.
In the inquiry Nicholson found that “Majola had surreptitiously negotiated the payment of bonuses with the IPL in a meeting in London during June of 2009. These were paid with the monthly payroll run of CSA on July 22 2009 and the relevant employees’ taxes were deducted.”
The report also found that Majola had “failed to inform [then-CSA president Mtutuzeli] Nyoka of his own negotiated bonus, as arranged with the IPL and also refrained from providing Nyoka and members of the [CSA’s] remuneration committee with the schedule of payments relating to the IPL agreement, thereby misleading Nyoka in the process.”
It was established that Majola received a bonus of R1Â 131Â 062 while chief operating officer Don McIntosh took home R797Â 999.
Majola told the inquiry last year that he had no say in the bonus amounts, which he contended was done by McIntosh.
The inquiry found that “overwhelming evidence, however, indicates that Majola [and not McIntosh] was the dominating force behind the allocation of the bonuses and not an unwilling recipient as he sought to portray himself”. — Sapa