Within 18 months, North West Cricket has gone from being one of the most financially stable cricket unions in the country to being investigated for various financial irregularities and possible corruption.

According to a report, the North West Cricket’s board of directors has decided to seek guidance from Cricket South Africa (CSA) following reports they received from a group of auditors and lawyers concerning the stadium upgrade in 2017. NWC currently does not have enough funds to conduct its own internal forensic audit.

In this regard, it has formulated its own report, based on these findings, and sent it to Cricket South Africa on 19 November with the intent ‘to establish if there were any irregularities, misappropriation, misrepresentation, fraud, theft or corruption,’ regarding the stadium project. CSA approved the projected R7,1 million needed to fund the upgrade.

One of the main issues during the stadium upgrade was that there was not enough time to implement the upgrades before the test match between South Africa and Bangladesh in September 2017.
In the report that the labour lawyer, Deanne Howes from Howes Incorporated Attorneys presented to North West Cricket’s former CEO, Vincent Prior, there were several findings and recommendations. These included inflated invoices from suppliers that amounted to three times the standard rate. There was insufficient due diligence in the accounting procedures during the stadium upgrade process and the payment of the suppliers was somewhat poor to non-existent.

Many former employees at North West Cricket also resigned during this tumultuous time, amid potential claims of fraud and misappropriation of finances.

Consequently, North West’s club cricket chairmen are also up in arms concerning the reports of the auditors’ and labour lawyer above and are currently seeking legal representation to conduct their own forensic audit.
‘We are not going to wait on CSA’s forensic audit to get answers to the situation at North West Cricket.
‘We are conducting our own audit to see where the lack of due diligence and mismanagement of funds occurred,’ stated one of the club chairmen.
At the time of print, CSA was yet to submit their findings to North West Cricket, based on the report that was sent.
*This is a developing story.