Super League Basketball has dismissed an attempt by the British Basketball Federation to end the legal battle that has torn the domestic game apart and seen the men’s national team banned before it reaches the High Court.
In a letter to the BBF sent on Monday, SLB interim chair Sanjay Bhandari rejected a compromise offer proposed by the beleaguered governing body last week on the grounds that it ignored many of the fundamental concerns that clubs have repeatedly raised.
“SLB has set out… the agreed parameters within which SLB is prepared to discuss a resolution to the dispute. Your letter does not engage with these at all,” Bhandari wrote in the correspondence, seen by City AM.
Chief among SLB’s objections is that the BBF wants to preserve the 15-year licence to run a league it awarded to GBBL, a US consortium fronted by former NBA executive Marshall Glickman, in a process which sparked SLB’s legal challenge.
“Your letter purports to offer SLB recognition on ‘similar terms to those proposed by SLB in May’. Clearly, the terms are not similar to those previously sought by SLB,” Bhandari wrote to the BBF.
“As SLB has explained on countless occasions, there cannot be a resolution to the litigation unless the GBBL Licence is terminated. The GBBL Licence is illegal and its terms are expressly designed to harm SLB.”
Furthermore, Bhandari said, world governing body Fiba’s decision to suspend the BBF over regulatory concerns, leading to the national team’s exile, means it has no power to recognise leagues and “cannot be trusted to govern men’s professional basketball”.
He added: “This is not a game: SLB investors have invested more than £20m in UK basketball over the past 18 months and the BBF’s conduct continues to jeopardise that investment. We urge the BBF to engage meaningfully with the issues that confront basketball in the UK.”
BBF letter to SLB cites ‘spirit of compromise’
SLB, which has begun the new season outside of the Fiba licensing framework, said five letters to the BBF in October alone, detailing concerns around the BBF’s solvency and its ability to play national team players and coaches, had gone unanswered.
“These issues have very significant consequences for British clubs, the national team, the players and the fans,” this week’s letter concluded. “Given what is at stake, it is unconscionable that the BBF is simply ignoring these matters in correspondence.”
The BBF’s letter containing draft terms for an agreement – sent by interim chair Grace Jacca and addressed to “Sanjay Bhandara” (sic) – began: “We write to you in the spirit of compromise and with the intention to build the consensus needed to reach a resolution”.
It asked SLB to stay its litigation against the BBF and GBBL to afford time to thrash out a deal, which would in turn would allow the BBF to ask that Fiba lifts its suspension on it and the men’s national team, who have scheduled World Cup qualifiers later this month.
GBBL and Glickman recently wrote to the BBF urging it to “take all steps necessary to settle the [SLB] claim against both BBF and GBBL, and including your counterclaim against SLB”.