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New York:-Gladstone Dainty, president of the USA Cricket Association (USACA), and board member Dr Linden Dodson of New York have filed a lawsuit in United States District Court in the Eastern District of New York against the ICC and its chief executive David Richardson, seeking $2 million dollars in damages for defamation and “tortious interference with business relations between plaintiffs and the United States of America Cricket Association”.
Previous legal actions brought by Dainty, as part of collective legal challenges and defences on behalf of the USACA board of directors, have been argued by the high-powered law firm of McGuireWoods LLC. According to USACA’s 2013 tax return filing, the governing body spent more than $360,000 in legal fees that year. However, the lawyer representing Dainty and Dodson in the April 30, 2018 filing against Richardson and the ICC is Gary Certain of Certain & Zillberg PLLC, whose website advertises their service as a no win, no fee representation.
Even though the lawsuit is a personal filing by Dainty and Dodson, it argues mainly that the ICC has injured USACA. A central claim is that the ICC “proposed and demanded constitution and rule changes” that violated USACA’s autonomy and served not the board’s best interests “but rather the personal preferences of the officers and directors of the ICC”. Similarly, the suit claims that any changes forced by the ICC on USACA would violate its 501(c)(3) non-profit status.
This would directly impact Dainty and Dodson, according to the lawsuit, because the changes the ICC attempted to mandate were “part of its malicious and thinly vailed [sic] campaign to oust the duly elected members of USACA’s board of directors”. As part of their business interference argument, the suit claims that USACA’s expulsion has “prevented the plaintiffs and other board members from meaningfully continuing in their capacities as sanctioned members of the international competitive cricket community”.
One of the reasons USACA was initially suspended and eventually expelled by the ICC was its failure to ratify a new constitution that would have enacted sweeping reforms on the governance of the organization. However, Dodson subsequently has been a long-serving member of the ICC’s Sustainable Foundation advisory group, which designed the new constitution for USA Cricket, the new governing body in line to replace USACA as the ICC’s Associate member in America.
The suit asks for injunctive relief “staying the expulsion of USACA as the United States of America associate member to the ICC”. They are also seeking injunctive relief “prohibiting the ICC from granting any class of ICC membership” to any other entity operating within the USA such as USA Cricket.
However, the suit has not been made with USACA as a plaintiff. Previous statements made by Richardson hint at the reason USACA is not a co-plaintiff in this most recent filing. ICC members are bound to go through mediation in disputes regarding membership, something that occurred last year prior to USACA’s expulsion.
“They’ve already taken the matter to the ICC Dispute Resolution Committee on an expedited basis, attempting to stop the board and full council from considering the expulsion of USACA at these meetings,” Richardson told reporters last June at the ICC annual conference after the decision to expel USACA, via a unanimous vote of the ICC membership, had been made public. “The arbitrator found in favor of the ICC and found the ICC had acted rationally and was quite entitled to take the decision to expel USACA
As for the defamation claims, the suit argues that Richardson and the ICC made false statements against the members of the USACA board. Most of the statements were made by US cricket stakeholders, which included USACA members, as part of interviews collected and summarised in a confidential report seen by ESPNcricinfo, authored by Richardson and then head of global development Tim Anderson, which was presented to ICC members ahead of a vote for USACA’s suspension in 2015. It was the third time that USACA had been suspended in a decade, with previous suspensions occurring in 2005 and 2007 for governance problems.
The suit claims that “in the context of social and professional communications the plaintiffs have been confronted with inquiries concerning the disparaging statements of the defendants”. Dodson works as a veterinarian in New York and Dainty is a certified public accountant (CPA), businesses “whose practices rely on their professional reputations for honesty, competency and integrity which are assailed by the disparaging statements,” according to the suit.
ESPNcricinfo reached out to the ICC for a response to the suit filed in New York by Dainty and Dodson, but a spokesperson declined to comment.