The Bangladesh Cricket Board (BCB) officials said on Saturday that they will take legal action against World’s number one all-rounder Shakib Al Hasan for signing a sponsorship deal with Grameenphone.
Shakib on Tuesday signed the agreement with former national team sponsor Grameenphone for an undisclosed sum, a day after the country’s cricketers went into a strike placing an 11-point demand to BCB.
The strike eventually ended on October 23. Grameenphone, which is majority owned by Norway’s Telenor, was the sponsor of Bangladesh Cricket Board during the period of
2009-2011.
“We do not have any records of Shakib informing us about the deal officially. Whenever a player makes a deal with Telenor, he needs to inform the BCB about it. We are looking into it. The BCB president has already talked about it, and we are looking into the issue.
I cannot say anything more than that,” said BCB CEO Nizamuddin Chowdhury
to the reporters in Mirpur on Saturday.
According to BCB’s players’ agreement, a cricketer under national contract cannot sign for any telecom company.
Although, there is no question that Shakib broke legal terms but experts believe that the timing of this legal action to be taken against Shakib indicates to some sort of grudge which BCB holds against Shakib after the strike dilemma.
Meanwhile, in a recent interview with national Bengali daily Kaler Kantho, BCB President Nazmul Hasan Papon also said the board is set to take legal action against Shakib. Papon’s interview on Saturday also had some
hints of BCB’s exasperation on Shakib.
“We are going to take legal action. There is no scope to spare anyone.
We will seek compensation from both the company and the player,” said Papon.
“We thought it’s a kind of ‘I don’t give a damn to the rules of Board’ attitude. If that is the case, of course, we will take tough action against it,” he said.
Papon also said the cricket board incurred huge losses after the company signed players individually instead of bidding to become the team sponsor in 2015 when a rival operator won the deal.
“Robi [Telecom] was our title sponsor and Grameenphone did not bid and instead they grabbed few cricketers by paying them taka 1 or 2 crores. What happened in the end? The board lost
taka 90 crores in three years,” he said.
“This is why we barred the players to sign any agreement with telecoms yet, he (Shakib) did this. And you see the timing? Agreement after stopping play. These are audacious behavior,” he said.
The BCB president was still not satisfied with his harsh scrutiny on Shakib. He also criticized Shakib for his on-field performances.
“We defeated England and Australia in our own ground. Now we lost to Afghanistan. If I was responsible I would not show my face let alone stage a protest,” he added, referring to Bangladesh’s 224-run loss in one-off Test against Afghanistan in early September when Shakib was the skipper.
