Pietersen hits out at Stanford

England batsman Kevin Pietersen has described Sir Allen Stanford as "a sleazebag" - and insists the end of the team's lucrative partnership with the American is "not a bad thing".

The England and Wales Cricket Board decided to sever all ties with Stanford followed the charges levelled at him on Tuesday by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in his native America. It accuses the financier of masterminding a fraud totalling US dollars 9.2billion in value. England players will lose out financially after the collapse of the lucrative Twenty20 deal but Pietersen is not unhappy about the end of the relationship.

"Stanford was a sleazebag. I was very uncomfortable with the whole Stanford thing," he told the News of the World.

Pietersen had a deal with Stanford to promote the infamous winner-takes-all clash between England and the Stanford Superstars in November last year, which ended in an embarrassing defeat for England.

He said: "It was not that I was captain at the time, it was the uncomfortable situation of everybody thinking the England team had been sold.

"With the financial state of the world, people were talking about money instead of cricket.

"Those kind of things just didn't seem right to me, so it's not a bad thing we are not going to have that tournament any more.

"I was an ambassador for Stanford - a player face - but that contract has gone."