Former ZC MD commends Mukuhlani on debt solution

Mehluli Sibanda, Senior Sports Reporter
FORMER Zimbabwe Cricket managing director, Faisal Hasnain has praised the organisation’s chairman Tavengwa Mukuhlani for the role he played in finding a solution to ZC’s debt, which saw the cricket mother body’s debts being housed under the Zimbabwe Asset Management Company.

In his report presented at last Friday’s ZC annual general meeting, Hasnain, who resigned from his post in April this year described how he personally saw how hard Mukuhlani worked to find a solution to ZC’s debt situation and achieved an outcome which had no precedent.

“After months of intense negotiations, the major landmark achievement during this period was the formal arrangement that ZC finally managed to reach with the Ministry of Finance and the Central Bank. Under this arrangement, the Central Bank was able to take over all the commercial bank loans of ZC through ZAMCO, its asset management vehicle,’’ Hasnain wrote.

The arrangement, Hasnain said it gave ZC an opportunity to consolidate and refinance its expensive commercial loans and transfer these under Zamco at a much lower interest rate. Under the Zamco arrangement, the interest rate for the ZC loans is fixed at 6,5 percent with the cricket mother body to repay the principal amount in 2023 in the form of one bullet payment.

ZC loans that went under Zamco were for NMB Bank, CBZ, Metbank and Ecobank totaling $14 million. ZC managed to get a 30% discount so have to pay $10 million at the end of 2023. There are indications that in 2020, ZC should have settled all its creditors, using the current controlled ICC funding.

It is envisage that with the Zamco solution in place, ZC should be able debt free in future and will not struggle to pay salaries with the core business of cricket being able to thrive. ZC’s legacy debt had continued to choke the cricket mother body because of the high interest rates that were being charged for the loans.

ZC have re-introduced the franchise system with post for the four general managers to look after these franchises having already been advertised. Mukuhlani made it clear that they were merely returning to the old system of having cricket being played by the four big provinces in the country, which has been necessitated by ZC’s financial situation.

“We are re-introducing franchise system, we have gone back to our four big provinces, they are being called franchises but we are not going back to that expensive format. What we want is to have a domestic structure that is strength for strength and it’s a two-year project,’’ Mukuhlani said.

Meanwhile, Mukuhlani on Thursday met the new appointed Minister of Youth, Sport, Arts and Recreation Kirsty Coventry at her offices in Harare. Mukuhlani was accompanied by ZC acting managing director Givemore Makoni, consultant Vince Vintcent van der Bijl and chief financial officer Feroza Shariff.

The ZC delegation managed to brief Coventry on the goings on at ZC, including the exclusion of all rounder Sikandar Raza for the tours to South Africa and Bangladesh. Raza was left out from the two tours after walking out of his contract in protest against being denied a No-Objection Certificate to play in the Global Twenty20 League in Canada when the national team was in camp preparing for the visits to Zimbabwe by Australia and Pakistan.  —@Mdawini_29