ISLAMABAD: Pakis­tan Cricket Board will have a new interim management committee, this time under former board chief Zaka Ashraf that will work for the next four months, it emerged on Wednesday.

The new 10-member committee comes after Zaka’s election as PCB chairman on June 28 could not be held due to litigation despite the 70-year-old having the backing of the federal government to become the country’s new cricket chief.

Alternatively, the government has now appointed Zaka as the head of the interim committee, which replaces another committee led by Najam Sethi that ran PCB affairs for the last six months.

Meanwhile, sources have told Dawn that the government will vigorously contest all cases filed against the elections of the PCB.

Other members of the committee are Mustafa Ramday, Kalimullah Khan, Ashfaq Akhtar, Mussadiq Alam, Azmat Pervez, Zaheer Abbas, Khurram Karim Soomro, Khawaja Nadim and Zulfiqar Malik.

PCB’s chief election commissioner has also been changed with Meh­mood Iqbal Khakwani replacing Ahmed Shahzad Rana.

Zaka was set to take over the hot seat after his nomination, alongside that of Mustafa Ramday, to the Board of Governors of the PCB by Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, who is also the board’s Patron-in-Chief, only for the elections to be stayed by high courts in Balochistan and Lahore.

Enjoying the full backing of Federal Minister for Inter-Provincial Coord­ination Ehsan-ur-Rehman Mazari, Zaka’s name was put by Pakistan Peoples Party, which is part of the coalition government with Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz.

Last week, the IPC ministry also moved to get an audit of the PCB of the last six months, during the time when the Sethi-led committee was in-charge, conducted by the Auditor General of Pakistan office.

Published in Dawn, July 6th, 2023