NEW DELHI: The Committee of Administrators (CoA) will take charge of the daily management of the BCCI with the board’s chief executive officer, Rahul Johri, going on leave. Johri, who was named last week in an anonymous allegation of sexual harassment as part of the #MeToo movement, had been asked by the CoA for an explanation and ESPNcricinfo understands he has taken leave to prepare it.
Johri – who has not yet publicly reacted – has not visited his office at the BCCI headquarters in Mumbai since the allegation surfaced. The CoA had also “exempted” him, at his request, from attending the ICC’s chief executive committee meetings later this week in Singapore. The ICC, ESPNcricinfo has learned, also had reservations about Johri attending the meeting and is understood to have conveyed them to the BCCI.
Vinod Rai, the CoA chairman, told ESPNcricinfo he did not want the issue to “simmer”, and hence gave Johri seven days to respond to the allegations. “It is a purely anonymous complaint,” Rai said. “It is on an unknown Twitter handle and it pertains to a period much before he [Johri] joined BCCI. The CoA felt it would only be fair to us and him that we give him a chance to explain.”
