Moontown

SALT FISH AND RICE; COU COU

MACARONI PIE; GARLIC POTATO

BAKED CHICKEN; BAKED PORK

PICKLED BREADFRUIT; FRIED SNAPPER

GRILLED BARRACUDA; PLAIN GRAVY; BEEF STEW

Prime Minister Baldwin Spencer and MP for St. John’s City West Gaston Browne have settled out of court, but it’s not clear at what cost to the country’s leader.

Both Browne and Opposition Leader Lester Bird were suing PM Spencer and the ruling party’s Crusader Radio for defamation after certain comments were made about them at a public meeting at Thwaites corner during the run-up to the March 2009 general elections.

When contacted by the AntiguaSun, Prime Minister Spencer declined to go into any detail, explaining that the matter was settled out of court.

So far as Bird is concerned, the SUN has learnt that his matter was adjourned for further discussion in October.

Attorney Leon “Chaku” Symister represented Prime Minister Spencer in the matter.

It’s not clear what was the outcome of the matter where the radio station was concerned. Attempts to reach its lawyer Lenworth Johnson last night proved futile.

The school principal who is accused of having improper contact with students has been arrested and charged for committing sexual acts against the teenagers.

The man appeared in the St. John’s Magistrates’ Court before Chief Magistrate Ivan Walters yesterday.

He is charged with two counts of serious indecency and two counts of indecent assault.

The prosecution made no objections to bail, but advised the court that the man is a national of St. Kitts. A request was made by the prosecutor for the accused to surrender his travel documents.

The father of three is alleged to have committed the offences against two girls, the magistrate granted him bail for each child.

He was released on $10,000 bail with a cash deposit of $1,000 and one surety each.

His lawyer Ralph Francis told the court that media reports have suggested that the principal had been on the run.

Francis, however, made it clear that his client was in police custody since last Wednesday but was released on Friday and asked to return to the station on Monday.

According to Francis, the 44-year-old man is now unemployed, having resigned his position at the school. The AntiguaSun understands, though, that the principal was forced to resign from the position after the school’s board got wind of the allegation.

Francis said the man does not have any previous brushes with the law.

“Running from here to St. Kitts is like running from here to Willikies, so I am asking the court to grant him bail. He will be here, sir,” Francis said.

The principal was ordered to surrender his travel documents, and he has to report to the Police Headquarters every Monday and Friday between 6 a.m. and 6 p.m.

Magistrate Walters warned the man not to have any further contact with the complainants.

The principal is alleged to have molested a 14-year-old and a 15-year-old girl.

The offences are alleged to have occurred between 1 and 30 April and 1 May and 31 July.

Reports are the matter came to light after one of the girl’s mother found out about the interaction and questioned her daughter, who admitted to the alleged sexual contacts.

The woman reported the matter to the police and investigations were conducted, leading to the arrest of the principal.

The man stood in the accused box dressed in a long sleeved stripe coloured shirt and a dark coloured beige pants with a solemn look on his face as the bail proceedings were taking place. He managed to muster a few smiles in response to statements made by his sureties while they were being questioned by the magistrate.

Committal proceedings are set for 18 Jan., 2010.

Indicted financier R. Allen Stanford is seen June 25 being escorted into the federal courthouse in Houston. Stanford is in hospital and undergoing heart tests. - FILE A lawyer for Texas billionaire R. Allen Stanford, says his client has had a medical procedure that allows doctors to diagnose and treat heart conditions.

Criminal defence attorney Dick DeGuerin told the Houston Chronicle he did not know the results of the heart catheterisation test that was done on Monday.

Judy Rodriguez is a health supervisor at Conroe Regional Medical Center and on Tuesday she declined to release information on Stanford to The Associated Press.

DeGuerin said Stanford was taken to that Houston area hospital last Thursday after he had a high pulse rate.

The illness caused Stanford to miss a court date in the trial that accuses him of orchestrating a US$7-billion pyramid scheme. He has denied the allegations.

New details about how Stanford allegedly bilked investors were made public last Thursday after James M. Davis, Stanford’s former chief financial officer, became the first person to plead guilty in the case.

A business empire

The former finance chief said his boss created a business empire where blood oaths were taken to secure loyalty, bribes were paid from a secret Swiss bank account and investor profits were more fiction than financial genius.

Stanford, Davis and other executives of the now defunct Houston-based Stanford Financial Group are accused of orchestrating a massive Ponzi scheme by advising clients to invest more than US$7 billion in certificates of deposit from the Stanford International Bank in the Caribbean island of Antigua.

Davis pleaded guilty in Houston federal court to three counts: conspiracy to commit mail, wire and securities fraud; mail fraud; and conspiracy to obstruct a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation.

The plea is part of a deal Davis, who has been helping prosecutors, made with the Justice Department in exchange for a possible reduced sentence.

Irregular heartbeat

His plea came hours after Stanford was first taken from the privately run prison where he is being held outside Houston to a local hospital with an irregular heartbeat and high pulse.

Stanford had been set to appear in the same courtroom for a hearing on whether he can get a new attorney.

Davis’ 23-page plea agreement provided new details of how Stanford’s business began; how he, Stanford and others manufactured profits; and how panic set in as they tried to hold off federal investigators who were closing in on their scheme.

Investors were promised their investments were safe and were scrutinised by Antigua’s bank regulator and an independent auditor.

Stanford claimed higher rates of return on his CDs than those offered by commercial banks in the US and consistent double-digit returns on his bank’s investment portfolio.

But Davis said in the court documents that the bank’s balance sheets were made up and the work of “reverse engineering.”

“Stanford was insistent that (the bank) appear to show a profit each year. Stanford and Davis would collaborate to select a false revenue number … Stanford, Davis and other conspirators would then use the ‘budgeted’ numbers to develop falsely inflated revenue numbers which would be claimed as the ‘actual’ revenue numbers to generate the desired return on investment,” according to the plea agreement.

Asked why Davis defrauded investors for years, David Finn, his attorney, said it was greed.

To protect his scheme, Stanford paid more than US$200,000 in bribes, as well as US$8,000 for two tickets to the Super Bowl in Houston in 2004, to Leroy King, the former chief executive officer of Antigua’s Financial Services Regulatory Commission (FSRC).

King has also been indicted with Stanford and is awaiting extradition to the United States.

Davis said Stanford secured King’s loyalty in a most unusual way.

“Sometime in 2003, Stanford performed a ‘blood oath’ brotherhood ceremony with King and another employee of the FSRC … This brotherhood oath was undertaken in order to extract an agreement from both King and the other FSRC employee that they, in exchange for regular cash bribe payments, would ensure that the Antiguan bank regulators would not ‘kill the business’ of the bank,” according to the plea agreement.

Bribes

Stanford had Davis get the bribe money from a secret Swiss bank account that was funded by investors’ money. The account was also used to make bribes to the bank’s outside auditor.

When the SEC began investigating Stanford’s bank and contacted King by letter in 2005 and 2006 about its probe, Stanford and others in his company helped King write false and misleading response letters.

“King appeared very stressed. King related that he had again been contacted by the SEC. King asked Davis if ‘we were going to make it?’ which meant whether the fraud they had been engaged in was going to be exposed. Davis informed King that he thought they were going to be OK,” according to the plea agreement.

By mid-2008, Stanford, Davis and other conspirators were “desperately seeking a fraudulent mechanism whereby they could artificially inflate (the bank’s) assets” and hide that Stanford had used US$2 billion of investor money to make loans to himself, said the plea agreement.

They came up with a bogus real estate deal that falsely inflated a US$65 million real estate sale in Antigua into a US$3.2 billion bank asset.

Subpoenas served

By January 2009, the SEC had served subpoenas to Davis, Stanford and other executives about the bank’s CD investments.

In February, Davis, Stanford, company lawyers and other executives met in Miami to discuss testimony that Chief Investment Officer, Laura Pendergest-Holt and another executive would give to the SEC.

At that meeting, Davis revealed that 80 per cent of the bank’s investment portfolio was made up of grossly overvalued real estate and of US$1.6 billion in loans to Stanford, meaning the bank was insolvent.

Stanford at first said the bank had more assets and liabilities but later in private “acknowledged that (the bank’s) assets and financial health had been misrepresented to investors and were overstated in (the bank’s) finances,” according to the plea agreement.

Davis faces up to 30 years in prison when he is sentenced. While a sentencing date of November 20 was set, Finn said he believes that will be delayed.

As part of his plea agreement, Davis was also ordered to forfeit US$1 billion in proceeds he made from his illegal actions, although there’s little hope Davis can ever retrieve the funds.

Finn said authorities have seized all his client’s assets and Davis, who had made between US$5 million and US$6 million in the last decade, is broke and now doing manual labour on a relative’s farm in Michigan, making US$10 an hour.

Hearing postponed

Hittner postponed a hearing in which he would hear arguments about Stanford’s legal representation.

DeGuerin has asked for permission to quit the case because he doesn’t have assurances he will be paid.

Stanford was considered one of the richest men in the US with an estimated net worth of more than US$2 billion. But he claims he is now penniless.

Stanford, along with three former company executives, have pleaded not guilty to various charges, including wire and mail fraud, in a 21-count indictment issued June 18.

Stanford has been jailed without bond since then.

- AP

Edward Seaga, former prime minister and Distinguished Fellow at the University of the West Indies. - Rudolph Brown/Chief Photographer Former Prime Minister of Jamaica, Edward Seaga, says Jamaica has no alternative but the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

“I have been saying that before any decision was taken officially that we would return to the IMF,” he said in response to questions posed to him at the American Chamber of Commerce of Jamaica economic breakfast forum at The Jamaica Pegasus Hotel last Thursday.

His pronouncement came just ahead of the posting of the Government’s latest operational report indicating that the deficit has now climbed to $52.6 billion - $3 billion worse than projected at July 2009.

Tax collections are now $7.5 billion off base and total revenue $9.7 billion off target.

Total income for the combined four months to July was $86 billion, compared to bills and debt servicing costs of $139 billion.

“There is absolutely no choice. There is no commercial bank that you can go to find resources of up to several hundred million dollars to close the foreign exchange gap,” Seaga said.

We have no choice

“And there is no resource institution you can go to find the necessary amounts to close the fiscal gap. IMF is the only bank that can provide those funds, so we have no choice,” said the former leader of the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP).

Seaga, whose administration in the 1980s had a borrowing relationship with the IMF, said the primary objectives of an agreement would be to repair the fiscal deficit and the foreign exchange deficit.

He, however, made it clear that the JLP administration will have to exercise creativity to find new areas to replace the traditional foreign exchange earners of the country.

Seaga was referring to the bauxite industry, where all but one plant has been closed due to a slump in demand for the product, and the declining tourism industry.

“The foreign exchange deficit is the one that will give us a tremendous amount of trouble because most of the foreign exchange earning sectors are already almost up to the maximum in terms of their own earnings,” he said, highlighting tourism and bauxite.

Now, he added, is the time for policymakers to get creative and seek out new areas of economic activity like “we did in the 1980s”.

This, he said, was when his administration introduced the apparel manufacturing and modern-ised agriculture.

The Bruce Golding administration anticipates a decision by the IMF in October on a US$1.2 billion stand-by facility requested.

Priority areas

Already, the Bank of Jamaica has got US$303 million in Special Drawing rights that has boosted its foreign reserves to US$1.9 billion.

If the IMF is able to address the two priority areas and is able to lend other funds to help fund the semi-productive sector, Seaga said, the best way to use that fund is to put it into education.

“That is where I would like to see the funds go, because that is the real resource base of Jamaica that has not yet been fully utilised,”said the former prime minister now a fellow at the University of the West Indies.

Seaga however shied away from advising the government on the issue of cutting the public sector to contain a ballooning wage bill.

“Different folks have different strokes,” he said in response to a question on how he would advise Golding on controlling the public sector wage bill.

The salary bill to July was $43 billion.

Seaga said he was forced to make the tough decision of cutting 27,000 jobs during 1987 when the country had a borrowing relationship with the IMF and had to satisfy its conditions.

However, Seaga whose presentation was titled “The IMF of the Past” said those days were different.

“The IMF of today is no longer looking at strategies that are extreme. The IMF of today has realised that varying the exchange rate is not a solution,” he said.

“They have moved now to maintaining low inflation as the anchor of the variables they have to adjust but more than that, they have to realise that you can’t adjust an economy by adjusting the figures, you have to adjust the people É and so now it is the IMF that is insisting on social programmes but in the past they never wanted any social programmes.”

Lavern Clarke, Business Editor
Mguel Angel Oliva, vice-president of public relations and corporate affairs, HBO Latin American Group.

Three of Jamaica’s largest cable companies are unlawfully distributing HBO and Cinemax programmes, the owners of the content have alleged in a complaint to the Broadcasting Commission, and an executive of HBO Latin America Group says the company is fed up with years of negotiation that have gone nowhere.

But cable operators have shot back that HBO has been trying for more than a decade to force Spanish content on an English-speaking market, and is just now developing a service specifically for the Caribbean that could potentially replace the feed they now take.

The Broadcasting Commission is now investigating, said chairman Dr Hopeton Dunn.

The regulator has told cable operators to “cease and desist” showing the feeds in the interim, Wednesday Business was advised.

HBO is making the case that the issue is both one of infringement of intellectual property rights and a breach of the terms of their subscriber TV licences, which dictate that the content distributed must be with the agreement of the owners.

HBO Latin American Group, which says it has sole jurisdiction within the international company for signals and content in Latin America and the Caribbean for eight channels - HBO, HBO Plus, HBO Family, HBO Caribbean, HBO HD, HBO on Demand, Cinema and Max Prime - says it is losing US$5 million to US$6 million annually from non-compliant Jamaican cable operators who broadcast their signal and distribute their content without permission.

Spanish feed unsuitable

“We have major problems with Jamaica,” said Miguel Angel Oliva, HBO-LAG vice-president of public relations and corporate affairs.

“We have been talking with the cable companies and Broadcasting Commission - nothing has happened.”

But one of those cable operators says Jamaica has been trying to tell HBO Latin America that this market does not want Spanish content, and that to discontinue the distribution of the North American feed would be akin to giving away customers to rivals.

“All our competitors have the North American content, so we would be at a disadvantage,” said Florence Darby, managing director of Telstar Cable.

Columbus Communications Jamaica, trading as Flow and Logic One, were also named in the HBO complaint with Telstar and accused of “pirating the said broadcasts contrary to honest business practices”.

Dismissing HBO’s claim of constant appeal to regularise, Paula Francis, manager of Logic One, said the programmer has spoken to her company twice, the first time being in July 2009.

“HBO, 10 years ago, offered a Spanish feed,” she said. “We do not speak Spanish.”

The Jamaican operators offer North American content, but this, said Darby, is a breach of HBO policy, whose domestic strategy requires that signal and content must be acquired from the entity that owns and distribute programmes in particular zones.

But now the company is in the process of fine-tuning a new Caribbean channel which, according to the ‘demo’, appears to offer much of the same content of the feed Jamaicans like and currently consume, according to another operator, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

That feed remains in the developmental stages, no contracts have yet been developed, nor has the service been priced, the operator said. But companies will subscribe to the feed ifit retains the programming that the Jamaican market wants, the operator said.

Angel, who was in Jamaica on an overnight visit Monday, told Wednesday Business that his company had blocked HBO and Cinemax on the weekend.

But Wednesday Business checks indicate that while, for example, the HBO feed on Flow was disrupted, it lasted about an hour, and the channel was still up and running at mid-afternoon Tuesday.

Darby, however, said Tuesday that her company has removed the channels from its offerings “until the issue with HBO is resolved.” Her company meets again with HBO today to continue negotiations. Francis also said that Logic One has dropped the feeds.

Darby said she is somewhat wary of the company, whom she believes is aggressively pushing to strike a deal with her to build a more concrete case that the other companies’ failure to pay amounted to a breach of the fair competition rules.

“I have a good relationship with the other operators,” said Darby, who added that she would not want to upset that in any way.

HBO-LAG has already alleged in the Broadcasting Commission complaint - in an August 17, 2009 letter - that not only does the alleged ‘pirating’ of its signal and content constitute a breach of copyright and trademark laws, it was also “an act of unfair competition” under the Fair Competition Act for current and future businesses.

Said the letter signed by Jose Sariego, vice-president of legal and business affairs, it “places the cable companies at an unfair advantage over other cable and similar broadcast companies that are either already established or which propose to be established in Jamaica. Lastly, the cable companies’ actions amount to a misrepresentation to the public that the cable companies have the required permission to broadcast HBO and Cinemax signals in Jamaica.”

Regulator not responsive

Angel complained Monday that up to now the Broadcasting Commission has not been as responsive as the company would have liked.

“We had a meeting last year. They said they would help with infringements.”

The letter of complaint, copied to HBO’s lawyers, DunnCox in Kingston, comes after what Angel says has been years of discussions, still ongoing, with all the parties.

Dunn told Wednesday Business that the commission received the letter on August 24, and immediately wrote to the three cable operators on August 25 and 26, asking that they provide him with information.

Any action taken by the commission, he said, would be dictated by the responses given by the three companies who are Jamaica’s top cable providers.

“We are just soliciting information at this stage,” said Dunn.

“If it is established that cable operators are using material or content that is not properly acquired, then we will act.”

Dunn confirmed that selling content without permission from its owners does constitute a breach of the STV licences.

Where such breaches have been detected in the past, the commission, he said, has often worked with the companies as intermediary to get their service regularised.

Flow Jamaica, a subsidiary of a larger regional company - in a late statement last night that skirted Wednesday Business queries on HBO’s claims including why its service was compliant in some countries but not in others - said only that the company was still in dialogue with HBO and the Broadcasting Commission on the issue of content developed for Jamaica being in line with the North American feed.

“This is an industrywide issue,” said Flow marketing director Sharon Roper via email.

Angel said, however, that if the operators did not like the content the company was offering, they had another option - not showing the material.

To that Darby said: “Our customers want HBO,” and cutting the feed would put her company in an unfair position, given that all others are offering the illegal content.

“If we all stop then that’s fine,” she said.

Angel says HBO has grown impatient with the discussions and is prepared to act more aggressively, which, he said, includes an unexplained legal strategy.

Arthur Hall, Senior Staff ReporterMost Jamaicans seem to have accepted that much of the country’s present economic problems are being caused by global conditions and not mismanagement by the Bruce Golding administration.

But that does not mean that Jamaicans have absolved present and past administrations.

While nine out of every 10 Jamaicans agree that the country is in the middle of a major economic crisis, there is no consensus on who or what is to blame.

The latest Gleaner-commissioned Bill Johnson poll found that 65 per cent of Jamaicans point to world circumstances for the pickle in which Jamaica finds itself.

However, 24 per cent blame Bruce Golding and his team while 21 per cent point the finger at the People’s National Party administration which governed the country for 18 years up to September 2007.

“Fourteen per cent of the people think they are better off now than they were before the last election and almost two-thirds, 64 per cent, say they are worse off. The reasons they feel they are worse off are the rising unemployment and perceptions of increases in the cost of living,” Johnson noted.

The pollster also found that Golding and his team were rated behind the PNP when the respondents were asked which of the two major political parties would be better able to deal with the economic crisis.

Better manager?

In the poll conducted on August 8, 9, 14 and 15, Johnson found that most respondents viewed the issue through green- or orange-tinted glasses in responding to the question of which party would be the better manager.

But with a margin of error of plus or minus three per cent, it was a statistical dead heat.

Thirty-six per cent claimed the PNP would be the better captain of the ship of state as Jamaica moves through these turbulent waters, while 33 per cent said the JLP.

“Don’t forget that 31 per cent or a third were undecided as to who they believe could do better but, as with all of our results, there is such a direct political connotation. People who voted for the PNP tend to think they would do better while the voters for the JLP think they would do better,” explained Johnson.

There was some good news for Golding as he approaches his second anniversary as prime minister, with Johnson finding that half the country expects that their economic situation will be no worse in the next two to three years.

Expected improvement

In fact, 40 per cent of respondents told Johnson that they expect their standard of living to improve by 2011 or 2012 when the next general election is due. Of that number, 14 per cent say they expect their situation to be much better.

“By a four to three ratio, people tend to be more optimistic about the future,” noted Johnson, while pointing to the 30 per cent of Jamaicans who are bracing for a decline in their standard of living by 2012.

And even as four in every 10 Jamaicans gave Golding a vote of confidence in his ability to improve their standard of living, the respondents were clear that he needs to tweak if not overhaul his present economic measures.

A worrying 55 per cent said they disapprove of the job the Golding team is doing in handling the economy which has seen higher-than-anticipated interest rates and limited incentives for the productive sector.

Only five per cent of the respondents indicated strong approval for Golding’s economic measures, showing that even supporters of his party have reservations about the measures his government has implemented over the past two years.

Two years after taking the reins of power, the Bruce Golding administration is coming under increasing pressure for its failure to meet its campaign promise of creating hundreds of new jobs.

The latest Gleaner-commissioned Bill Johnson poll found that seven out of 10 Jamaicans are disappointed with Golding and his team for their failure to create jobs and prevent unemployment.

The Johnson poll, conducted in early August among 1,008 respondents, found that only five per cent of Jamaicans strongly approve of the efforts of the Government on the employment front.

Seventeen per cent of the respondents said they approved giving Golding a positive rating of 22 per cent. This is about 11 percentage points below the average level of support from Jamaica Labour Party voters in the polls.

“I expect that the poll will show that most persons are not satisfied with the Government’s handling of the job situation, particularly remembering the JLP’s pre-election mantra of ‘jobs, jobs, jobs’,” Lambert Brown, president of the University

and Allied Workers’ Union, told The Gleaner.

“It would be consistent with data in the polls you have already released which show unemployment as a major concern and would reflect the job cuts which started even before the economic recession.

“No one is safe, from a manager in a major financial institution to a worker at a small entity, plus the seeming victimisation in some government agencies. People are not seeing any investment or any sign that things will change. There are no green shoots or roots of new investments,” Brown added.

The latest data from the Ministry of Labour and Social Security show almost 20,000 people losing their jobs since late last year.

The Government has argued that this is not unusual in the present economic crisis, which has seen millions of people losing their jobs worldwide.

“We are not finding jobs in Jamaica, even to meet a good proportion of recent graduates at both university and high-school level … . Jobs are very hard to come along,” Labour Minister Pearnel Charles recently admitted.

Golding has also admitted that job creation should be a major international priority. He used an address to the International Labour Organisation to back a proposed “global job pact”.

“Job creation is not an outcome of economic recovery. It is essential to economic recovery. It is the only sustainable way of stimulating the demand for goods and services without which investments will not take place, factories and businesses cannot be revived and the decline in trade will not be reversed,” Golding said.

The dispute between the West Indies Cricket Board (WICB) and the West Indies Players’ Association (WIPA) is now heading towards arbitration after mediation talks broke down yesterday.Mediator Sir Shridath Ramphal had been in discussion with the feuding parties since last month, but after a series of meetings for five straight days since Friday, the row over players’ contracts remained unresolved.Above, WICB vice-president Dave Cameron (right) getting advice from Trinidadian attorney-at-law Derek Ali, with the board’s legal officer Alanna Medford (centre) listening in at yesterday’s Press conference at Kensington Oval. (Picture by Gregory Waldron.)

by EZRA STUART

Mediation talks on pay and contractual issues between the West Indies Cricket Board (WICB) and the West Indies Players Association (WIPA), being held under the chairmanship of mediator Sir Shridath Ramphal, broke down yesterday.

WICB vice-president Dave Cameron made the disclosure at a hastily convened media conference at Kensington Oval yesterday afternoon, hours after the stalemate following five consecutive days of talks.

“No agreement was arrived at between the parties at the conclusion of the mediation process,” he said.

“The next option which is provided under the dispute resolution clause in our MOU/CBA with the players’ association is arbitration to finally resolve the issues.

“The players have changed essentially how they want to be represented and viewed in commercial terms.

“We are saying to the players that any change has to be agreed to between the parties. While we may accept what you are suggesting, there is a process for that, and while we had agreements in the past, let us continue to operate under those agreements, negotiate new agreements [in] which we would [take] into consideration all that you have proposed, and agree to them.

“[But] the reaction has been: ‘Accept us now, without contracts and let us play while we determine the best way forward’.

“We [have] done that long enough and believe that approach is unacceptable.”

Prior to this latest effort, which began last Friday, Cameron said other mediation meetings had been held for four days early last month.

In a radio interview yesterday, Sir Shridath, who had set monthend as the deadline for reaching a solution, said there was now an uncertain, dangerous and worrying future for cricket in the Caribbean.

“I think West Indies cricket is in danger of serious deterioration,” the former Commonwealth secretary-general said.

He said that within the last two days, the parties had been extremely close to an agreement.

“All that changed dramatically when one party [the board] introduced an entirely new document and refused to negotiate on any other,” he added.

The dispute, arising out of issues over players’ contracts, resulted in the first-choice West Indies players, under the captaincy of Chris Gayle, boycotting the recent two-match Test series against Bangladesh.

Despite making themselves available, they were not selected for the Champions Trophy, scheduled to start in South Africa on September 22.

Cameron said the next step would be to invoke the dispute resolution process of arbitration, as both the WICB and WIPA would have to agree on a arbitrator.

“Even before we go to arbitration as the final say, we are still willing to negotiate a settlement going forward.

“[But] what the board is unwilling to do is to set aside its agreements and be in a position of uncertainty as to the future of West Indies cricket,” he said.