Probe into charges against Bacher

By M. S. Prabhakara

CAPE TOWN, JUNE 14. The King Commission of inquiry is conducting an ``urgent investigation'' into the match-fixing allegations made against Dr. Ali Bacher, managing director of the United Cricket Board of South Africa.

In its news broadcast today, the SAFM radio station quoted a report in this morning's Beeld (Image), the Afrikaans newspaper published from Johannesburg, which said that the King Commission had received a fax message from a Johannesburg lawyer, Mr. Peter Soller, making such claims. The allegations refer to the rebel tour of South Africa by a group of West Indian cricketers in ``the early 1980s''. It is claimed that Dr. Bacher offered the West Indian players extra money to lose the one-day match played at the Wanderers during that tour. The broadcast said the King Commission had confirmed receiving such a report and was conducting an ``urgent investigation''.

Dr Bacher was the key figure in the efforts of the cricket administration to break the sports boycott of the apartheid regime. He was instrumental in organising the first of the rebel cricket tours of South Africa in 1983. Large sums of money were offered and paid to bribe any and every international player ready to play in South Africa, in defiance of the policy of their national boards, and often to their permanent exclusion from their national teams. Alvin Kallicharran of the West Indies was paid rand 70,000 to play for the Transvaal for two years at the end of 1981.

He never again played for the West Indies.

There are many unanswered questions about the rebel tours, especially about their financing, the sums promised and paid, the modes of payment, the use of conduits and off-shore facilities to make such payments and so on, every one of which necessarily included corruption and bribery.

When the Commission adjourned its hearings half way through the morning session yesterday, Mr. Edwin King, who is heading the commission, said such decisions were inevitable in proceedings of this nature. ``Time is required for further investigation and preparation,'' he said.

The Commission will resume hearings tomorrow.

S. Africans feel betrayed

CAPE TOWN, JUNE 14. Scores of South Africans of all races and ages each day pack the hearings being conducted by the King Commission into the Hansie Cronje scandal, drawn together by shock at revelations that have shown their cricketing heroes too have feet of clay.

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