Cricket: Indian promoter threatens to sue Fleming

1.00pm

New Zealand cricket captain Stephen Fleming has been threatened with legal action by an Indian sports promoter over match-fixing claims made in his newly-released book.

The businessman told reporters today he was considering filing action against Fleming, who claimed he was offered £200,000 ($541,565) in 1999 to join a match-fixing syndicate.

"I am certainly considering filing a defamation suit but I cannot do so only on the basis of media reports," the man was quoted as saying by the Press Trust of India.

"We will go through the book and what is written in it and would take appropriate decision in a couple of days."

In his book, Balance Of Power, Fleming wrote that during the test series against England in 1999, an Indian man approached him in the bar of the team's Leicester hotel .

The man told him there was an international syndicate speculating on the likelihood of certain results of occurrences.

"He'd pay me £200,000 straight up, then another £100,000 in a year's time," Fleming wrote.

"I remember looking at the numbers he'd written down and saying, 'Look, I don't think we should be talking about this. I don't really want to be part of this at all."'

The businessman today strongly denied having offered any money to Fleming.

Allegations levelled against him by Fleming were a "gimmick" to sell his book, he said.

He had met Fleming, England allrounder Chris Lewis and West Indian Brian Lara, not for fixing matches, but to enlist their services for a tournament in India.

Fleming wanted to have a "management contract" in India to write columns because it was a "big territory", the man said.

"The match was off, but he could certainly go forward with the columns (that he was to write in the media), which was amounting to between US$150,000-US$200,000 for over a year," he was quoted as saying.

- NZPA