The West Indies Cricket Board has come out in the open for the first time against allegations that it sold its vote to the Asian Bloc to help it win the rights to host World Cup in 2011.
Ken Gordon, President of WICB said the region acted in its best interests in throwing its support behind the joint bid by Asian countries, which included India, at an ICC meeting in Dubai in April.
"We live in the real world and we must understand that when people want to achieve an objective, they try to get support for that objective. Clearly, the India Board wanted to have support for their objective and we did speak. We made it clear that our position was that we were interested in building a relationship with India," Gordon told CMC's Cricket Plus.
Gordon said WICB was interested in building a relationship with India and supported it just as friends support each other.
"We didn't have a vote for sale. We were interested in building a relationship and they indicated that they would like to do the same and our position as far as the vote was concerned was, 'look if your bid is a fully competitive bid and if it is on par with all things being equal, we will support your bid because friends support each other'."
However, he said he made it clear to the BCCI that they would not support them if in their view the bid was not comparable to their rivals -- Australia and New Zealand.
