IPL mess : Why so surprised? - Gideon Haigh

[Karan114]

BCCI president lashes out at Modi Cricinfo staff June 5, 2010 Shashank Manohar, the BCCI President, has lashed out at Lalit Modi over his allegation that Chirayu Amin, the interim IPL chairman and Modi's replacement following his suspension, had bid for the Pune franchise. While clarifying that Amin's intention had been to only invest in City Corporation Ltd, the consortium that bid for the franchise, in the event of their success, Manohar alleged it was Modi who urged the franchise to contact Amin to become a part of that consortium. Manohar, who has issued such a statement for the first time, also rubbished allegations made against him by Modi, who had claimed Manohar had influenced the bidding process and had called for the suspension of board secretary N Srinivasan on charges of conflict of interest. "Mr Modi, since yesterday is trying to malign the image of the Board and Mr. Chirayu Amin by making statements which are far from the truth," Manohar said in his release. "I did not react earlier when he made allegations against me and the Hony. Secretary as I did not wish to dignify his ridiculous allegations with a repartee. Today I am replying, because he is trying to tarnish the image of the Board and its members. "It is alleged by Mr Modi, that Mr Amin had given a bid along with the Pune Franchisee - City Corporation Ltd. He has further alleged that I did not inform him about the letter from Mr. Amin seeking permission to bid and that the said communication was suppressed from him and the Governing Council Members. "The truth is that it was Mr Modi himself who sent a message to the Pune Franchisees through Mr Ajay Shirke, President, MCA, .asking them to contact Mr. Amin and ask him to be a part of the Consortium." Manohar added Amin had informed him about the approach made by the Pune franchise and that he would formally seek permission from the BCCI to invest in the consortium in the event of a successful bid. Amin's case could have been considered by the board, Manohar said, only if he had "put forward a concrete proposal to invest." "First and foremost, Mr Amin's letter was not for asking permission to bid. Secondly, he was not a bidder with City Corporation Ltd and this even Mr Modi has agreed in his interview to Times Now," Manohar said. "It is thus clear that the claim of Mr Modi that Mr Amin was a bidder is misleading and is only to malign the image of the Board and it Members." The consortium was headed by Aniruddha Deshpande, managing director of City Corporation. While the bid document was submitted in City Corporation's name, Deshpande said the company had allowed him to use the name only for the purpose of bidding. Manohar said that while Modi was aware of this, he did not share the information with the governing council, which could have rejected the bid for lack of information. "Mr Modi has also made a statement that Mr Aniruddha Deshpande,MD City Corporation Ltd, had informed him that though the bid was submitted on behalf of City Corporation Ltd, it was in fact a personal bid on behalf of himself. Mr Modi , who claims to be above board in all matters, did not think this very cogent and important piece of information should be shared with Governing Council Members /Officials," Manohar said. "His statement becomes even more questionable in the light of the fact that the bid document tendered on behalf of City Corporation Ltd gives information only regarding City Corporation Ltd and does not give any personal information about Mr Aniruddha Deshpande. The bid could have been rejected at the threshold if it had been from Mr Aniruddha Deshpande ,in his individual capacity, as it did not carry the necessary information about the bidder, ie. Mr Deshpande." Manohar claimed he was compelled to issue a strongly-worded rebuttal to Modi's allegations to protect the reputation of the BCCI. "Mr. Modi, who is himself in the dock, is trying to tarnish the image of the Board by making false and misleading statements time and again when as a fact the Board has landed in this embarrassing situation due to his own misdeeds. "The reason for me releasing this statement is that the BCCI is an Institution which is the best run Sports Body in the country and the image of BCCI cannot be allowed to be tarnished by people like Mr Lalit Modi." http://www.cricinfo.com/ipl2010/content/story/462092.html

[IKnowU]

Manmohar trying to be all nice guy and play the 'good guy' since the attention is not him anymore.

[achilles]

Manmohar trying to be all nice guy and play the 'good guy' since the attention is not him anymore.

Manmohar? :hysterical: He pwned the babus coz according to IBN, he said that "Anirudh Deshpande didn't make bid in an individual capacity but in the name of the company, which exactly opposite to what was claimed.

[Chandan]

So how is the big fish, Powar involved in the mess, apart from supporting Modi to hilt? Well, my favourite columnist Prem Panicker analyses that in detail: Pawar play June 7, 2010 prempanicker

A couple of days ago,this newspaper unearthed fresh evidence to show the involvement of a powerful minister and his family members : together,they held 16.5 per cent share in a company that had bid for one of the teams from Pune.Unlike their claims,let us be clear that it is not an insignificant portion;but that is another story. The fact is all this would have remained buried but for some sharp investigative reporting; after all, theirs was an indirect investment in the form of two companies : Lap Finance and Namrata Film Enterprises. Who would have guessed the powers behind these two obscure companies.

Who would have guessed, indeed! [The above is a clip from ToI Sports Editor Bobilli Vijay Kumar's opinion piece in Sunday's paper]. Not for the first time [and speaking as a mediaperson myself], I’m hugely amused by how well trained we journalists have become. Someone, for his or her own personal interest, throws us a nicely colored ball. And off we go en masse, barking happily, to ‘fetch’. ToI, for instance, has front-paged the story of Sharad Pawar’s links to the IPL most days over the previous week. The pattern was set early: a revelation and reactions from Pawar/Supriya Sule one day. Next day, a fresh revelation that refuges Pawar/Sule, and the father-daughter combine’s reactions to that revelation. And so on — with the paper making self-congratulatory asides about its intrepid reportage. [Tangential note: I'm talking of ToI here merely as the most obvious example].

The fact is all this would have remained buried but for some sharp investigative reporting.

Umm. The fact is, all this would have remained buried but for (a) Lalit Modi’s misjudging a strategic play and tweeting publicly about Sunanda Pushkar’s sweat equity and (b) the resultant no-holds-barred war within the BCCI, that has led to some inspired leaking by both sides. For instance, ToI’s “sharp investigative reporting” claim is belied by the fact that every media outlet has copies of the same documents in its possession. Consider:

DNA has in its possession a copy of a City Corp board resolution —submitted by Deshpande to the BCCI along with his bid — expressly authorising him to bid on behalf of City Corp.

That’s DNA on the front page, yesterday. Here’s Cricinfo:

But the minutes of the January 31 meeting, a copy of which is available with Cricinfo, states that Deshpande was asked to go ahead with the bid in the company’s name.

I could go on — that theme, of having the document in possession, is a constant in pretty much every media house that covered the story. If you didn’t know better, you’d end up conjuring visions of a whole pack of journalistic Sherlocks following the blood trail and, in concert, fetching up at the spot where the body was buried. More prosaically, what you are actually seeing is the outward manifestation of an internecine conflict for control of the BCCI. Modi, who needed to please his backers, attempted to torpedo the Kochi franchise by roping in Pushkar’s equity, and linking her to Tharoor. That got the whole show-cause snowball rolling. Pawar, who is intricately linked with the IPL, backed Modi to the hilt [though Modi has other backers within the BCCI's higher echelons, Pawar's is the most powerful voice; without him, the rest fall apart]. That was stage one. Once it became clear that the disciplinary hearing would end in Modi’s ouster, the ‘IPL commissioner [suspended]‘ attempted to up the ante by first pointing fingers at Shashank Manohar and more pertinently, to N Srinivasan. The idea was to undercut his opposition by taking out the two top members of the BCCI hierarchy. Now comes the BCCI push-back: some inspired leaking by the board’s bigwigs [how do you suppose the documents "came into the possession" of various media entities?] is clearly aimed to turn the heat right back on Pawar, to reduce him to a spent force, and thus to weaken Modi’s position within the board [in a case of unintended irony, the documents the board is now busily leaking are from the very same boxes Lalit Modi had delivered, with considerable fanfare, to the BCCI -- thus earning brownie points for giving up what was actually BCCI property in the first place]. Significantly, Modi took time off from responding to his own slew of notices to mount a spirited — if not persuasive — defense of Pawar. The amusing part is how the media is playing facilitator in what is really an internal war. Each fresh revelation triggers a concerted baying for blood: first Tharoor; then, when the government of India got into the act through its investigative arms, Modi; then, through Modi’s various tweets and media statements and letters, the likes of Srinivasan; now, Pawar… Interested parties want one or the other personality brought down; some inspired whispering in the media’s receptive ears is all it takes these days to get the job done. Which is not to suggest that the various officials are lily-white. The board is one vast web of conflicting interests [it always has been -- from what seems an endless lifetime of chronicling the board's shenanigans, [/url=http://www.rediff.com/cricket/2000/dec/08bcci.htm]here's a link to a series dating back to when the CBI, after concluding its match-fixing investigations, went after the BCCI -- oh, and by way of bonus, the man in charge then was AC Muthaiah, who is now playing the role of crusader]. The current scenario is no different: Modi has his fingers in the IPL pie; N Srinivasan has a stake in it; so does Sharad Pawar; IS Bindra and other officials get their slice of the action; star cricketers Ravi Shastri and Sunny Gavaskar get to suckle at the BCCI’s teat in return for lending the board the legitimacy, such as it is, of their presence… The defenses trotted out by those under attack are equally hilarious. N Srinivasan, responding to the charge of conflict of interest, argued that he had Pawar’s permission [which is nice -- one conflicted official gave another official permission to be similarly conflicted]. Pawar’s argument is that he may have stakes in entities ranging from City Corporation to, more recently, Vijay Mallya’s United Spirits, argues that owning stake in a company that bids for IPL franchises is not equal to owning a stake in an IPL franchise. And Manohar produced this gem while defending Chirayu Amin from a recent Modi salvo:

Shashank Manohar, the BCCI President, has challenged Lalit Modi’s contention that Chirayu Amin, the interim IPL chairman, was part of a consortium that bid unsuccessfully for the Pune franchise. While clarifying that Amin’s intention had been to only invest in City Corporation Ltd – the concerned group – in the event of a successful bid, Manohar alleged it was Modi who urged the franchise to contact Amin to become a part of that consortium.

Eh? The ‘clarification’ is that a senior board official wanted to wait and see if a particular entity won its bid — and then he would invest in that entity? That is a ‘defense’? And that is why why I’m not particular impressed by all this “investigative journalism” that’s going on. What, after all, has all this muck-raking unearthed? That various officials have hidden stakes in the IPL? No ****, Sherlock? What, you thought Modi was running the IPL without taking a salary because he was interested in the uplift of cricket in this country? Or that sundry officials push and shove and elbow each other to get prime positions in local associations and through that, in the BCCI hierarchy, motivated by nothing more than undiluted altruism? Here’s what I wish the media would do. In its next expose, could it incorporate a line that reads: ‘Documents leaked to us by Shashank Manohar Lalit Modi N Srinivasan [insert appropriate name here] indicate that…’? At least that way, we’d know who is playing the latest hand in this endless soap opera — and that would help us understand better the nature of the latest set of charges being levelled. I think it is the most crisp analysis of the Powar power saga, so far.

[Feed]

I-T to probe IPL rights, Modi wrongs There's fresh trouble brewing for Lalit Modi and, perhaps, the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI). More... I-T to probe IPL rights, Modi wrongs Anand Vasu, Hindustan Times New Delhi, July 14, 2010 There's fresh trouble brewing for Lalit Modi and, perhaps, the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI). They have to respond to the Income Tax department's detailed questionnaire on all the rights sold by the IPL, including big-ticket TV deals, in-stadia advertising and hospitality rights. They have also been asked to furnish details on the two rounds of bidding for related storiesHouse panel to probe tax evasion by IPL team-owners, Board the teams, including amounts paid, bank guarantees furnished and even particulars of the failed bidders. A number of government enforcement agencies have been probing Modi, the suspended Indian Premier League chairman — and by extension the BCCI — for several months now, over alleged irregularities in the running of the billion-dollar plus league. With Modi, it is alleged misuse of power that is being investigated — from travelling only in luxury cars paying exorbitant rates to using the plush Four Seasons hotel as an IPL office and to entertain guests, to more serious issues relating to the allotment of teams to certain interest groups and the allocation of various IPL rights. In the first auction in 2008, there were eight successful bidders, the original IPL franchises, plus unsuccessful bids from Deutsche Bank, Emeralds Telecom, DLF and, late bids from Sahara India, the Future Group and ICICI Ventures, which were disqualified. In 2010, two additional teams (Pune and Kochi) were sold in a fractious process that included several bidders being turned away and a subsequent controversy that resulted in Shashi Tharoor resigning as Minister of State for External Affairs. The Board also has to explain how it shared revenues from IPL with franchises. This is the second summons issued by the IT Department's Intelligence Wing, which first sought information from the BCCI on June 28. Despite several meetings and exchanges with the BCCI, no concrete information has been provided yet, and the IT department is clearly not happy. The fresh summons, a copy of which is with the Hindustan Times, specifically asks the Board to furnish details of all accounts with Golden Wings Pvt Ltd, a tour company, and name officials who used the company's services during the IPL. It also asks for details of all payments made to the Four Seasons Hotel in Mumbai since January 1, 2008, before the IPL began. HT had reported on June 26 on how Modi's ground transport bills (in excess of Rs 40 lakh) and his accommodation bills at the Four Seasons (total bill 1.2 crore, Rs 38 lakh of which needs further explanation) were not passed by the Board's working committee when it met in Mumbai on July 3. The Mumbai High Court is to hear Modi's petition on his recent troubles with the BCCI on Wednesday, and the Board's disciplinary committee is expected to reveal its findings by month-end.