MUMBAI: BCCI CEO Rahul Johri, widely considered to be Committee of Administrators chairman Vinod Rai’s point person in the Indian cricket board, has been fully exonerated by the three-member independent committee appointed to investigate allegations of sexual misconduct against him.
However, the two-person CoA is clearly a divided house on the matter with Rai saying Johri can now resume office while the other member Diana Edulji disagreed with both Rai’s position and the panel’s findings.
The committee, comprising retired Justice Rakesh Sharma, former Delhi Commission for Women chairperson Barkha Singh and lawyer-activist Veena Gowda, termed the allegations levelled against Johri as “baseless and fabricated” in their report.
“The allegations of sexual harassment in the office or elsewhere are false, baseless and have been fabricated and manufactured with an ulterior motive to harm Rahul Johri and throw him out of BCCI,” Justice Sharma stated in his findings.
“No adverse action need to be taken against Johri, CEO, BCCI, on the basis of these mischievous, false, fabricated, unsubstantiated complaints, e-mails, tweets, etc. on social media,” he added.
“Since there is no consensus between the two members of the Committee of Administrators regarding what action should be taken against Rahul Johri, the chairman (Vinod Rai) stated that the natural consequence would be that Johri continues as the CEO of BCCI and is entitled to resume office,” stated a release from the CoA on Wednesday.
“(Diana) Edulji disagreed with this. However, the chairman reiterated that Rahul Johri should continue as the CEO of BCCI and resume his duties, as a natural consequence,” it added.
Johri has been on forced leave for the last three weeks owing to sexual harassment allegations made against him levelled by a woman colleague in his previous organisation.
Gowda agreed that she has not found him guilty of sexual harassment. She, however, made some serious recommendations in the matter which run completely contrary to the “baseless and fabricated” allegations made against Johri.
“Each of the allegations before the committee has been dealt with above and as a conclusion I am reiterating some of the consequential observations made therein for recommended action:
A) The conduct of Rahul Johri at Birmingham as a CEO of an institution such as BCCI is unprofessional and inappropriate which would adversely affect its reputation and the same has to be looked at by the concerned authorities.
B) In view of his conduct at Birmingham as well as keeping in mind the allegations made by Ms X and his conduct before this committee with respect to the photographs submitted, it is essential that Mr Johri undergo some form of gender sensitivity counselling/ training,” she wrote.
Among those who deposed before the committee were Johri himself, Rai, Edulji, BCCI treasurer Anirudh Chaudhry, IPL petitioner Aditya Verma, former Mumbai captain Shishir Hattangadi and Neeraj Kumar, the former chief of BCCI’s anti-corruption unit.
The panel also heard depositions from two ladies who submitted complaints against Johri. One relates to his time at Discovery Communications, well before Johri took up his current role at BCCI and was also posted on Twitter recently. The second is a more recent one, during Johri’s tenure with BCCI, which was first brought to light by Hattangadi who was contacted by the alleged victim.
Incidentally, concerns had earlier been expressed about the panel’s reluctance to probe a previous complaint of harassment against Johri made by an employee of the board.
The allegations Johri is being probed for first surfaced when an incident involving an unnamed person, who claimed to be Johri’s colleague during his stint at Discovery, was shared by a Twitter user.
The committee was set up on October 25 and given 15 days to complete its investigation.
