Chris Cairns perjury trial told ‘two out of three’ can convict

After eight long weeks of evidence, the jury at Southwark Crown Court will today begin its deliberations into whether to find Chris Cairns, New Zealand’s former cricket captain, guilty of perjury, effectively confirming him as a match fixer.

The judge presiding over the case, Mr Justice Nigel Sweeney, spent a full day yesterday summing up the evidence and will carry on doing so this morning before sending the jury out to reach its verdict.

He warned the jurors that, in order to convict, they must believe the evidence put forward by “two out of three” of the key witnesses; the former cricketer and self-confessed match fixer Lou Vincent, his ex-wife Elly Riley and the current New Zealand captain, Brendon McCullum, who all testified that Cairns had been involved in match fixing.

Sweeney had previously warned the jury that Vincent, as a confessed match fixer, might have a motivation to be untruthful, given he has his own reputation to protect.

Riley gave evidence of a drunken conversation in 2008, in which she claimed Cairns assured her he and Vincent “would not get caught”. Sweeney reminded jurors she had said she did not agree to give evidence at the trial in order to tell lies.

Cairns and his wife, Mel, who gave evidence via video link from the family’s home in Canberra, Australia, maintain the conversation never took place and that Riley was drunk and involved in a row in the women’s toilets.

“If Elly Riley is right, the clear inference is Cairns was involved in cheating, too,” Sweeney said.

Sweeney also reminded the jury that aspects of Vincent’s evidence, including an assertion that Cairns once told him that playing in English county cricket would give him a chance to practise underperforming, and that Cairns had used a pen and paper to describe how to fix games, had never previously been mentioned in any of Vincent’s statements to the court.

Sweeney also said that former New Zealand cricketer Chris Harris had been “completely wrong” when he claimed Cairns’ decision to bat first during an Indian Cricket League match in 2012 was evidence that he was seeking to fix the outcome of the game. Contrary to Harris’s claim, Sweeney said that at the venue in question the statistics showed no great advantage in bowling first. “He was completely wrong about that,” Sweeney said.

The trial itself is a consequence of Cairns’ decision to sue Indian businessman and former Indian Premier League head Lalit Modi for libel, after Modi had called him a match fixer on Twitter in 2010. Cairns described the tweets as a “death sentence” owing to Modi’s influence in the game.

During his legal action, which was successful and won him £90,000 in damages, Cairns claimed to have “never, ever cheated at cricket”, an assertion which forms the basis of this prosecution.

If he is found guilty, the consequences are likely to be serious. Conservative politicians Jeffrey Archer and Jonathan Aitken have both been jailed for perjury as a consequence of successfully suing for libel.

Cairns has previously testified that the match-fixing allegations have left him unable to earn money from cricket and “frozen out” of opportunities to earn income from media work and that he had been working in manual labour “to earn a buck.”