When Canada’s national cricket team stepped onto the pitch at the Narendra Modi Stadium in Ahmedabad earlier this year, the moment carried genuine historic weight. The T20 Men’s Cricket World Cup is the sport’s highest stage, and for a country whose grassroots cricket infrastructure has expanded dramatically over the past decade, the appearance represented everything the sport had been building toward. Players had taken unpaid leave from regular jobs to be there. The families who had invested years and money in their children’s cricket were watching.
What was unfolding simultaneously inside Cricket Canada — its governing board, its finances, its selection processes, and ultimately its links to threats tied to a criminal organization — constituted a parallel story of a very different kind. According to a CBC investigation by the network’s flagship journalism programme, the fifth estate, the national governing body was deep in a governance crisis that had been allowed to fester without meaningful intervention from the institutions responsible for addressing it.
The investigation, based on insider testimony, a secretly recorded phone call, on-camera interviews, court documents, and financial records, does not just describe administrative dysfunction. It documents a system in which financial irregularities, selection interference, intimidation, and match-fixing allegations were present — and largely ignored.
A governing body in financial and structural disarray
The financial picture at Cricket Canada heading into the 2026 World Cup was stark. According to the CBC investigation, the organization generated approximately CAD 5.7 million in its most recent filing year, the overwhelming majority of it distributed by the International Cricket Council. Yet when auditors reviewed the most recent filing, they declined to sign off — too much information was missing to verify how the money had been spent.
That opacity in the accounts existed alongside spending decisions that drew sharp criticism from within the sport. According to the investigation, Cricket Canada’s board members approved USD 4,000 each for themselves in expenses to attend the World Cup — including for directors who did not travel. Players, meanwhile, were operating without long-term contracts; the organization’s offer for the period leading into the World Cup was CAD 3,000 per month for four months.
One high-placed Cricket Canada insider, whose identity and voice were protected by CBC due to fears of professional and physical harm, described the contrast bluntly. “No self-respecting person can justify a player going away to train and to play at the World Cup level for $3,000 a month when the mortgage payments are much more than that,” the insider told the fifth estate.
Devesh Shankar, a well-connected cricket commentator and prominent voice for cricket news in Canada, characterized the governing culture in broader terms. “Cricket Canada right now is governed by the people who want to capture this for power, to enjoy free tickets, free tours,” he told CBC. “Instead of focusing on the right objective and the goal, they are focusing on court cases, misgovernance.” By the time CBC began its investigation, Cricket Canada was engaged in at least three separate legal proceedings.
The CEO problem
Central to the governance failures documented in the CBC investigation is the appointment and tenure of Salman Khan as Cricket Canada’s chief executive. Khan had previously led the Calgary and District Cricket League, a role that ended in controversy — the local league had sued him over allegations of stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars meant for fields and facilities, and police had opened their own investigation.
Despite that pending legal exposure, Khan joined Cricket Canada’s board. Then, in January 2025, as police were preparing to lay charges, he was elevated to the CEO role. According to the CBC investigation, the appointment was made without a formal search process or public advertisement of the position. “Without a proper vetting process, without being advertised that Cricket Canada was looking for a CEO, he maneuvered, manipulated, became the CEO,” the organization’s insider told the fifth estate.
The contract CBC obtained — reviewed by employment lawyers consulted for the investigation — was structured almost entirely in Khan’s favour. Under its terms, if Cricket Canada terminated him for any reason other than a criminal conviction directly related to his duties, he would receive the remainder of his five-year term paid out in full.
Two months after Khan took the role, police charged him with theft and fraud. He remained Cricket Canada’s CEO for nine more months before the organization dismissed him – which was first reported by cricexec. He is now pursuing Cricket Canada for the balance of the contract — approximately CAD 475,000. In a statement to the fifth estate, Khan denied the theft allegations and denied any involvement in spot-fixing, session-fixing, betting, or interference in team selection. CBC’s reporter Steven D’Souza reached Khan by phone seeking comment prior to broadcast; Khan agreed to speak the following week, then did not respond further.
Selection interference and a coach pushed out
The governance dysfunction extended directly into cricket operations. Pubudu Dassanayake, currently USA Cricket’s Head Coach, had served as Canada’s head coach and helped guide the team to its T20 World Cup qualification. Dassanayake told CBC that in the lead-up to the 2026 tournament he was pressured by the board to select specific players for the squad. When he resisted, Cricket Canada declined to renew his contract — a decision he has challenged through a wrongful dismissal lawsuit.
“They shouldn’t have been in the World Cup,” Dassanayake told the fifth estate, referring to at least five players he said were placed in the squad against his judgment. “Some of the guys haven’t played cricket for two, three years locally.” He confirmed that the pressure went beyond squad selection alone: “I was asked to play certain players in the (starting) 11, or some people watched the team the night before. No one can force me to do certain things within my system. So I didn’t allow that to happen. But I was asked.”
The CBC investigation also features Srimantha Wijeyeratne, a player who had represented Canada at the international level and who found himself excluded from the 2026 World Cup squad. Wijeyeratne indicated that his omission was at least partly linked to the fact that he had spoken up on behalf of other players — a pattern the investigation characterizes as part of a broader culture of retaliation within the organization.
More seriously, CBC obtained a secretly recorded phone call from May 2025 involving Khurram Chohan, who had replaced Dassanayake as head coach. In the call — conducted in Punjabi, translated and read in English for the broadcast — Chohan discusses Cricket Canada President Amjad Bajwa, board member Rana Imran from Saskatchewan, and CEO Salman Khan. The conversation, as interpreted by the fifth estate, describes pressure on coaching staff related to lineup decisions in a context consistent with match or spot-fixing — placing specific individuals in the starting eleven with advance knowledge that could benefit bettors. “In hindsight, you can see why certain players were picked,” the organization’s insider told CBC.
A Cricket Canada board member subsequently forwarded the recording to the ICC’s Anti-Corruption Unit. Cricket Canada itself took no independent action. “What did they do about it? Nothing,” the insider said. “They’re all complicit in one way or the other. Silence is as good as being guilty.” Chohan did not respond to the fifth estate’s requests for comment.
A captain installed under a cloud
Five weeks before Canada’s opening World Cup fixture, with the squad already overseas in Sri Lanka preparing for the tournament, Cricket Canada’s board voted to install a new captain. Dilpreet Bajwa — inexperienced relative to several teammates and with far less seniority than Nicholas Kirton, who had been leading the team in the months beforehand — was announced as skipper in a decision that, according to the CBC investigation, stunned players and coaching staff alike.
The investigation’s primary insider was direct about what the appointment represented. “Simply a matter of somebody having influence on what’s going to happen to the games and who’s going to play and who’s not going to play,” the insider told the fifth estate. Asked by CBC whether he believed Bajwa had been placed in the captaincy to facilitate match or spot-fixing, the insider responded: “That’s my personal belief, yes.” The significance of the captaincy in this context lies in cricket’s structural reality: the captain carries exceptional on-field authority — over batting order, bowling rotation, field placement, and the real-time tactical decisions that govern the in-play betting markets most susceptible to manipulation.
During Canada’s third World Cup match, Bajwa — bowling as a spinner, a discipline requiring a slow, controlled run-up — delivered a no-ball. The foot fault was flagged immediately. Because spin bowlers approach the crease with a measured, deliberate stride, such an error at international level is considered highly irregular. Sources cited by the CBC investigation say that after the match, Bajwa missed a team meeting, was summoned for questioning by the ICC’s Anti-Corruption Unit, and had his phone searched. Bajwa did not respond to the fifth estate’s requests for comment.
Confronting the president
As the organization’s legal battles converged, D’Souza tracked down Cricket Canada President Amjad Bajwa at a hotel near Toronto where the board, joined by a senior ICC representative, was meeting ahead of a court-ordered special general meeting. Bajwa denied knowing that the team’s captain had been called in by the ACU during the World Cup. And he denied any personal involvement in the match-fixing allegations captured on the Chohan recording. “I can be accused of anything, but it has to have a proof in it,” he told D’Souza.
A BC court had issued a ruling shortly before that confrontation that left little ambiguity about the state of the organization. The presiding judge described Cricket Canada’s internal conflicts as “multiple civil wars driven by egos and ambitions,” criticized all parties for expending taxpayer-funded resources on litigation, and ordered the special general meeting at which the board’s future would be determined by a membership vote. When that vote took place, Bajwa was removed as president. So too was the vice president.
The incoming president of Cricket Canada is Arvinder Khosa.
The institutions watching from a distance
Andrew Ephgrave, the ICC Anti-Corruption Unit’s senior investigator, confirmed to the fifth estate that he is aware of the Chohan recording but declined to discuss any active investigations by name
Sport Canada, for its part, has communicated to Cricket Canada that governance improvements will be necessary to secure future federal funding — but has stated that a structural overhaul of the organization falls outside its mandate. The ICC, despite an apparent awareness of multiple elements of the situation, has not intervened directly.
“So you have to change the system,” the CBC investigation’s primary insider told the fifth estate. “It’s not worked so far. To do the same things and expect a different result will be the height of stupidity.”
Cricket Canada enters a new chapter of leadership carrying the full weight of unresolved legal proceedings, an active police investigation, pending ICC anti-corruption inquiries, and a CEO dismissal that may yet cost the organization nearly half a million dollars. The question of whether Khosa’s presidency represents a genuine break from the crisis — or its continuation under new management — remains, for now, unanswered.
The human cost of the institutional failure documented in the CBC investigation falls, as it typically does, on those with the least power to absorb it. “Future players, current players, and parents who have invested a lot of money trying to get their kids to play cricket and do the right thing” — that is how the investigation’s insider described who ultimately suffers. A source on the West Coast put the damage in terms that were harder to dismiss: “Basically now people think, to play for Canada or something, you need to be friends with these guys. You need to be friends with gangsters. That’s my frustration.”
