Exclusive: Big shake-up of ICC board as deputy chair Khwaja and Vallipuram ousted in Associate Member Directors election
There was a shock result that has major ramifications for the ICC board.
International Cricket Council deputy chair Imran Khwaja has been surprisingly ousted from the all-powerful board after the Associate Member Directors election on Wednesday in Edinburgh.
Associate chair Mubashshir Usmani was re-elected and will be joined on the board by Gurumurthy Palani (France) and Rudie van Vuuren (Namibia), who both campaigned hard.
Palani will now be the new Associate chair after he received the most votes with 35, while Usmani and van Vuuren tallied 26. Khwaja fell short with 23 and veteran board member Mahinda Vallipuram received 19.
It will be a new era for Associate cricket with Khawaja’s departure and the ICC will need to elect a new deputy chair. The Singaporean lawyer is the most experienced member of the board as he approaches almost two decades as an AM director.
He once had an uneasy relationship with mighty Indian powerbrokers, who supported New Zealander Greg Barclay over him during a heated 2020 election for the coveted ICC chair.
But Khwaja has since become a right-hand man for the all-powerful Jay Shah, who is something of a transcendent administrator in cricket.
Khwaja’s clout is evident as he is often handpicked to mediate complex and contentious situations such as between bitter foes Pakistan-India during the recent T20 World Cup and the governance woes in Sri Lanka.
Khwaja has also been tasked with handling some major inquiries, including the 2024 T20 World Cup cost blowout of an event co-hosted by the United States. According to sources, that inquiry has still not been seen at board level.
Vallipuram is also an experienced board director having completed three terms over a decade. He has been the architect of Malaysia’s rise into the hub of cricket in Southeast Asia while he has been praised for his left-field ideas such as bringing the BBL to his country.
Around 10-12 candidates were originally tipped to contest but one by one they decided not to, including former board director Neil Speight who pulled out late.
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