The former Australia captain was a member of the board that retained Paine in 2018
Taylor is the first person who was on the board at the time of the decision to speak publicly since Paine’s shock resignation as captain on Friday when the messages and investigation came out. He resigned from the board in November 2018 amid the fallout from the ball-tampering scandal.
“A decision was taken by the integrity unit and supported by the board to keep this in house,” Taylor told Nine’s Sports Sunday. “There’s obviously been a lot of conjecture about the rights and wrongs of that.
“That decision was made not just on what is best for cricket, but what was best for Tim Paine, Bonnie Paine and also the woman involved.”
On Saturday, the current CA chairman Richard Freudenstein said if this board had been presented with all the information now available they would not have endorsed Paine to remain as captain.
“Three-and-a-half or four years of hindsight is a wonderful thing,” Taylor said. “I don’t know if he has any more information, that the integrity unit had of Cricket Australia in 2018. It’s interesting to note that even now, having said that…they didn’t stand Tim down. He stood down, he resigned himself.”
Freudenstein said he had been told of the closed case – which found Paine had not broken the code of conduct – when he came onto the board two years but had not felt the need to delve back into it.
“Once you have a private matter that has been subject to a full integrity unit investigation, it wouldn’t be normal for that to be part of the handover,” he said.
“All I can say is the whole current Australian cricket board, including those members that were on the board in 2018, are very clear that if the same circumstances arose today, we would make a different decision.”
He added that since 2018 the code of conduct had been amended while additional player education now takes place including specific references to text messages.