Chris Cairns outside Southwark Crown Court in London on the day the prosecution unveiled its perjury case against him.
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Miss Sasha Wass QC claimed it was Cairns’ arrogance which led him to believe he would never be caught match-fixing.
Mr Cairns, who is also charged with perverting the course of justice, denies all the charges against him.
He also faces a joint charge with barrister and friend Andrew Fitch-Holland for perverting the course of justice by allegedly trying to induce fellow cricketer Lou Vincent to provide a false statement.
The Black Caps captain will say Cairns approached him about match fixing, and the Crown says Daniel Vettori, Ricky Ponting and Kyle Mills will back him up.
Wass said: ‘Mr Cairns was an arrogant individual and very sure of the power he held over the people around him’.
Cairns attempted to recruit current New Zealand captain Brendon McCullum, saying he could get between 70,000 and 180,000 dollars per match to throw games while playing in the ICL in 2008, the court heard. However, he tried to reassure Vincent that he would never have to swear his statement was true in court.
The Crown laid out details of the prosecution case in a trial expected to last around six weeks.
In the call Mr Fitch-Holland, who Ms Wass described as a cricket groupie, asked Vincent to write a letter saying he had not seen any wrongdoing. This was untrue. The prosecution can demonstrate that Mr Cairns had been involved in cheating at cricket, or match-fixing for a few time. He had earlier been offered money and a prostitute by an unidentified Indian man, an incident Cairns said would be “good cover” for their own match fixing. He later said he feel like “I’m being used again”. This is what he did: he lied in witness statements, he lied on oath and he arranged that others should give false evidence on his behalf.
“After all, the only people who knew for certain that Mr Cairns was engaged in match-fixing were those people who had been match-fixing with him”.
Vincent’s wife, Eleanor, would also give evidence of a dinner at a restaurant in Cheshire where England cricketer Freddie Flintoff was present though he “didn’t contribute to the conversation very much because he spent the time just drinking”.
Fitch-Holland advised Cairns to try to persuade Vincent to lie to support “Mr Cairns’ perjured/false evidence”.
Vincent refused, and Fitch-Holland followed up with a Skype call, which Vincent recorded.
Vincent said it was “a big ask for me to say in a legal document something that isn’t true”.
The money came from gambling on various events that might occur during a game that might be influenced by “corrupt players” to fix matches or aspects of matches.
Ms Wass said the New Zealand batsmen was depressed after being dropped from the national team and was abusing cannabis and alcohol. Mr McCullum didn’t log an official report on Cairns at the time.
It was “hard but not impossible” to prove match fixing, and the only way it could be exposed was if one of the participants in the cheating exposed it, she said. A Lions player then did well, the Lions won, and Cairns was “not pleased”. “At one stage he threatened to hit Mr Vincent with a bat”.
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During a Skype call, played to the court, Fitch-Holland told Mr Vincent: “If you can literally get a one-paragraph statement that says “I played in the game, everything seemed OK”, end of…it makes it plain that things are a lot more straightforward than they look”.
