Representatives from the Guyana and the Barbados cricket boards failed to show up at the virtual AGM
In a dramatic turn of events, the Cricket West Indies (CWI) board elections have been adjourned till April 11 after representatives from the Guyana Cricket Board (GCB) and the Barbados Cricket Association (BCA) failed to show up for the virtual annual general meeting. CWI subsequently said that the AGM had to be postponed as per the constitution due to the “lack of a quorum”.
For quorum, at least nine out of 12 voters had to be present, but with the GCB and BCA representatives not showing up, the CWI had to call off the election. In a media release on Sunday, CWI said representatives from the rest of the four territorial boards – the Jamaica Cricket Association (JCA), Leeward Islands Cricket Board (LICB), Trinidad & Tobago Cricket Board (TTCB), Windwards Islands Cricket Board (WICB) – were present.
“The meeting therefore could not proceed to business as the CWI Articles of Association stipulate that nine (9) representatives of the Full Members need to be present in person to constitute a quorum,” the CWI statement said. “Despite having previously authorized their representatives to attend, when the roll was called there were no representatives present from the Guyana Cricket Board (GCB) nor the Barbados Cricket Association (BCA).”
The Articles of Association provide that if there is no quorum within 30 minutes from the time appointed for the meeting (in this case, 10am Eastern Caribbean time), it shall stand adjourned to the next business day or to such other time and place as the Board of Directors may determine, and that at the adjourned meeting no other business may be transacted.
Attempts to reach the representatives from the BCA and GCB were unsuccessful, with the meeting eventually getting adjourned at 10.50am.
Sunday’s elections were meant to elect the president and the vice-president with two candidates in fray. Incumbent Ricky Skerritt and his deputy Kishore Shallow were contesting for a second two-year term against the pair of Anand Sanasie and Calvin Hope. Incidentally, Sanasie is the GCB secretary while Hope is the BCA vice-president, and both boards had nominated the pair for the CWI board elections.
ESPNcricinfo understands that both Sanasie and Hope were not present at the AGM but later Hope attended the emergency CWI meeting where the decision to postpone the elections was taken. It is understood that Hope opposed the new date of the elections, too, but was outvoted. Each of the six territorial boards have two votes each, which can be cast by two representatives nominated by each of these boards.
Both Skerrit and Shallow were nominated by the TTCB and the LICB. The pair also had support of WICB, where Shallow is board president.
As per the CWI constitution, the voting process is normally a show of hands unless any of the board members wants a secret ballot. It is understood that the CWI corporate secretary had created an electronic version of a ballot, as this was the first time the elections were being held virtually. In 2019, Skerritt had defeated Dave Cameron, who had been the president for six years, through a secret ballot with an 8-4 margin.
Why did Sanasie and Hope not turn up?
Skerritt and Shallow received a boost on Sunday when, along with the TTCB and the WICB, the JCA’s vice-president Donovan Bennett said that his board would be backing the pair. Incidentally, in the 2019 election the JCA had nominated Cameron.
According to Bennett, the JCA’s choice to back Skerritt was “unanimous” as he was impressive during his presentation of his manifesto recently. “When he made his presentation to the [JCA] board, we were surprised as to what he had achieved, it was a lot more than what we had expected taking into consideration the amount of time he had and restrictions that had impeded a lot of stuff that he wanted to do and so based on that, we thought that he deserved another term in office,” Bennett told the Sunday Gleaner.
The fate of the CWI elections carried a lot of importance for Sanasie because the GCB polls were also scheduled for March 29. However, it could not be confirmed if that was the key reason for the no-show.
Nagraj Gollapudi is news editor at ESPNcricinfo