OWN CORRESPONDENT, Cape Town | Thursday 12.45pm.
DISGRACED former South African cricket captain Hansie Cronje said on Thursday that his overwhelming greed for easy money from bookmakers blinded him to the immorality of his actions.
”I didn’t see the bad side of it at the time. Until April 7 I didn’t realise that I had been playing with such big fire,” he said on the second day of cross-examination at judge Edwin Kings’s government inquiry into match-fixing.
Cronje, diagnosed by psychiatrist Ian Lewis as clinically depressed, admitted last week to taking close to $100 000 in bribes from bookies but denied fixing any matches.
On Thursday he admitted that a further $30000 paid into his Bloemfontein savings account in January 1997 might also have come from Indian match-fixer Mukesh Gupta, known as MK.
”I assume it was from Gupta,” he said. ”But huge sums of money do go in and out of your account, especially when you are on tour.”
He said he had been driven to take the money by sheer greed, adding he was ashamed of the disgrace he had brought on himself, his family, his former team mates and the sport and the country he loves.
”I don’t feel good about what I have done. I don’t feel good that there has been dishonesty in cricket,” he said.
Cronje, whose father has taken up a permanent position at the rear of judge King’s courtroom, was sacked as national team captain on April 11 after first denying, then admitting, accepting money from bookmakers.
He has been offered immunity from prosecution if King, who must hand his report to President Thabo Mbeki by June 30, judges that he has made a full disclosure of the facts. — Reuters