Shammi Silva re-elected as SLC president

Majority of the previous set of office bearers were voted in uncontested, will hold positions for two years

Shammi Silva has been elected Sri Lanka Cricket president again, after he and the majority of the previous set of office bearers were voted in uncontested. They will hold these positions for two years.

Silva’s faction, which includes secretary vice-presidents Ravin Wickramaratne and Jayantha Dharmadasa, and secretary Mohan de Silva, did not face any challenges in this election, after an opposing faction withdrew from the election on Tuesday. That faction had been comprised of Sri Lanka’s first Test captain Bandula Warnapura, Nishantha Ranatunga, and K Mathivanan, and had cited the “lack of a level playing field” in the elections process in the letter indicating their withdrawal. Both Ranatunga and Mathivanan, however, had held elected positions within SLC over the last 10 years.

Although Silva’s faction regained their offices, they will now face increased scrutiny, after the parliamentary Committee on Public Enterprise (COPE) publicly questioned several financial and administrative lapses within SLC, earlier this year. There is also the matter of the previous board led by Silva having failed to hold elections in time, which led to the sports minister intervening to dissolve the board, and appoint a management committee to run SLC for several weeks until fresh elections were held.

The re-election of Silva and his committee also means that initiatives they had begun in their previous tenure – such as the Lanka Premier League – will likely to continue through this next tenure. Silva was first elected president in 2019, and had been vice-president before that.