Butt pats his own back for helping reveal massive irregularities in PCB accounts

Lahore, Nov.28 (ANI): Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB) chairman Ijaz Butt has said that the board would make all possible efforts to address the issue of massive financial irregularities during previous regimes.

Patting his own back, Butt said board's current set-up provided all help during the recent audit of the PCB, which revealed massive fallacies in its accounts during the last three financial years from 2005 to 2008.

"It is the remarkable openness of the current PCB management that has made all these facts come out in the public domain," The Nation quoted Butt, as saying.

"Whether it was the public accounts committee of the National Assembly or the Standing Committee on sports, the current PCB management has been cooperative at every step and has provided all the details of how the board was made to suffer because of the arbitrary and unaccounted actions of former managements," he added.

It should be mentioned that the audit conducted by the government agencies had revealed wide scale fallacies and financial mismanagement during the regimes of last three PCB chairmen Tauqir Zia, Shaharyar Khan and Nasim Ashraf.

According to the report, the PCB's annual expenditures had nearly doubled from 571 million rupees in 2004 to 1.8 billion rupees in 2008. The board recorded a surplus budget of just over 1 billion rupees in 2004, but by 2008 it amazingly suffered staggering loss. The loss was so high that the board's accounts went into a deficit of 130 million rupees.

"Money has been lost from non-recovery of rent (nearly 25 million rupees), it has been squandered and not recovered on legal bills of players such as Mohammad Yousuf and Mohammad Asif (over 20 million rupees)," the audit report said.

The report also disclosed that over 150 million rupees were taken out from the PCB's bank accounts without proper documentation.

During the audit it was also discovered that millions of rupees were released for giving salaries to former cricketers without any check. (ANI)