Chris Cairns perjury trial jurors retire to consider verdicts

Jurors in the London perjury trial of former New Zealand cricket captain Chris Cairns retired to consider their verdicts on Tuesday.

London: Jurors in the London perjury trial of former New Zealand cricket captain Chris Cairns retired to consider their verdicts on Tuesday. Cairns, 45, faces a charge of perjury after successfully suing Indian Premier League (IPL) founder Lalit Modi for accusing home of match-fixing on Twitter in 2010. Cairns, a New Zealand great, won £90,000 ($135,700) in damages from Modi in the March 2012 trial, but he is alleged to have lied to the court when he said that he had “never, ever cheated at cricket.” He also faces a charge of perverting the course of justice over allegations that he persuaded fellow cricketer Lou Vincent to provide a false witness statement for him during a Skype conversation.

Cairns’s legal adviser Andrew Fitch-Holland, 50, is also accused of perverting the course of justice. Both men deny the charges. The jury at London’s Southwark Crown Court has heard evidence from high-profile former cricketers including current New Zealand captain Brendon McCullum and former Australia skipper Ricky Ponting. Vincent told the court that he helped to fix matches under “direct orders” from Cairns while the pair played for the Chandigarh Lions in the Indian Cricket League (ICL), a precursor to the IPL, in 2008.

McCullum said that Cairns, the Lions captain, had approached him with a “business proposition” about match-fixing. Modi’s allegations concerned two editions of the ICL that took place between March and April 2008 and between October and November of the same year. As well as the £90,000 damages, Modi was also obliged to pay out £1.4 million in damages and costs following Cairns’s libel action. Perjury is a criminal offence in Britain, for which those found guilty can be sent to prison.