Daily Times

LAHORE: An independent adjudicator, appointed by the Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB), has reduced controversial batsman Umar Akmal’s three years ban for an anti-corruption breach to 18 months. Independent adjudicator Faqir Muhammad Khokhar, a retired judge of Supreme Court of Pakistan, announced the decision on Wednesday. Umar, who attended the hearing in person, will remain suspended effectively from February 2020 till August 2021. The middle-order batsman was banned in April this year for failing to report approaches to engage in corrupt practices ahead of this year’s Pakistan Super League Twenty20 competition. Umar appealed against the ban in May. He last played a Test for Pakistan in late 2009 but his most recent international appearance was in October 2019 in the T20 home series against Sri Lanka. In his judgement, the independent adjudicator said Umar’s confession that he failed to report match-fixing approaches on two occasions had left no room for doubt as to the veracity of the charges’. “The stance taken by the appellant is self-contradictory and not credit-worthy. The case against the appellant stands proved to the hilt,” the retired judge added.

Umar was provisionally suspended hours before his Pakistan Super League team Quetta Gladiators was to take on Islamabad in the opening match of the 2020 PSL. He did accept then that the incidents which formed the basis of the two charges pressed against him by the PCB had taken place, but pointed out that the circumstances were such that they did not merit reporting to the PCB. Umar initially did not contest the PCB charges, foregoing the right to plea his innocence. The case was directed to the chairman of the PCB’s independent disciplinary panel who, after hearing both the PCB and Umar handed down the three year ban. PCB’s independent disciplinary panel chairman Fazal-e-Miran Chauhan, a retired High Court judge, had observed that Umar had failed to give any plausible explanation for not reporting the matter to the PCB’s vigilance and anti-corruption departments and was in breach of article 2.4.4, and was deemed to have engaged in corrupt conduct under the anti-corruption code of the PCB. Umar’s appeal was based on the narrative that players who had fallen foul in a similar manner to him previously were handed far lighter sanctions, with Mohammad Irfan banned in 2017 for six months, and Mohammad Nawaz given a two-month ban. But it had emerged that he had been handed the stiffer-than-expected penalty for failing to show sufficient remorse.

Umar is the younger brother of former Pakistan wicketkeeper-batsman Kamran Akmal, who played 53 Tests, 58 T20s, and 157 ODIs for Pakistan, and cousin of current captain Babar Azam. Umar has featured in 16 Tests, 121 ODIs and 84 T20s, scoring 1003, 3194 and 1690 runs respectively. Umar promised a lot after making a hundred in New Zealand on his Test debut, but failed to live up to the high expectations that came with some fine performances early in his career. Constant run-ins with the authorities also marred his stop-start career. Umar had earlier escaped a PCB ban in February for allegedly making crude remarks to a trainer during a fitness test at the National Cricket Academy in Lahore. The batsman expressed dissatisfaction with the ruling and vowed to appeal again. “For now I am not satisfied and will consult my lawyers and family how to take this ahead. There have been many cricketers before me who have committed corruption but none of them were given a punishment as severe as mine. Just look at what they got and what I got. I will appeal once more to get my sentence reduced further,” Umar told media Wednesday after the fresh decision.