Thaindian News

New Delhi, April 22 (IANS) Former India captain Manusr Ali Khan Patuadi brought some sanity to the no-holds-barred debate over the Indian Premier League (IPL) by asking Lalit Modi to attend the Governing Council meeting Monday and pleading that the beleaguered commissioner, who was not long ago feted as entrepreneurial icon, be given time to present his case if he so desires.
As the income-tax and Enforcement Directorate (ED) continued their searches and seizures of documents from IPL franchisee offices across the country, charges and counter-charges between the cricket board president Shashank Manohar and Modi vitiated the atmosphere. Manohar accused the IPL chief of selectively leaking private e-mails and beaching the confidentiality clause in the franchise contract by social networking site Twitter.

Searches were conducted in Kolkata, Delhi (in the offices of GMR group that owns Delhi Daredevils) and Pune - in the office of the Sahara group that won the Pune bid for the new IPL that will play from next year, the other franchisee being Kochi over which Shashi Tharoor resigned as union minister last week.

Modi was grilled by the ED for the second successive day mainly on the process of awarding the television broadcasting rights and the media contracts to Multi Screen Media (MSM), World Sports Group (WSG) and Pat Magnarella Management in Bandra, Khar and Malad suburbs of northwest Mumbai.

The investigation zeroed in on the $80 million facilitation money paid by MSM to WSG.

Pataudi, a highly regarded sporting idol who was the country’s cricket captain in the 60s and 70s and is now on the IPL Governing Council, is clear that if Lalit Modi skips Monday’s meeting, he will surely be out.

But if Modi relents and says he has been busy working 20 hours a day and he needs time to prepare his arguments, he should be given.

“If he doesn’t come to the meeting, I suspect the BCCI will take a very strict view. Lalit is playing very hard to get. I am not sure what he is up to,” Pataudi told NDTV.

“But if he appears before the Governing Council and asks for some more time to present his case, I think he should be given 3-4 days. We all know that he is busy with the IPL and he should be given some time.”

Asked if Modi will be voted out, Pataudi said that the question of voting does not arise as he will simplay be removed.

The senior board members made it amply clear that Modi will be asked to quit, at Monday’s meeting.

Modi, however, is equally vehement in saying that he would either resign or attend the meeting and challenged the validity of board secretary N. Srinivasan calling the meeting, saying he was an interested party as the owner of a franchise.

The usually reticent Pataudi tried to put things in perspective when he said the Governing Council was as much responsible for the crisis as Modi was because it did not take enough interest in the business affairs of the highly popular product.

“It has been a failure of the Council. We should have been aware of what was happening. The fact that we didn’t question anything is because we were carried away with how well everything was going,” he said. “I saw the crowds, the IPL was very popular. Only the dirt attached to it is sad.”

Blaming the entire Governing Council, Pataudi said, the rumbling started over his style of functioning last year when a contract was changed and that was the time the council members started getting a little bit aware. Pataudi also said there is a clash of interest if board office-bearers own IPL teams, but was in favour of former cricketers having stakes in the franchisees.

“I think there is a conflict of interest in board secretary N. Srinivasan (chairman of Indian Cements that owns Super Kings) having stakes in franchisees. But he (Srinivasan) took the approval of the board and it is above board,” he said.

Pataudi feels that if Modi was ousted, a two to three member committee should be set up by the BCCI to run the Twenty20 league.

The income-tax officials in Kolkata stated to have found incriminating evidence from the offices of Kolkata Knight Riders, whose primary owner is Bollywood star Shah Rukh Khan, and the Cricket Association of Bengal.

The probe by the Directorate of I-T Investigation was on the legality of money transfers from tax havens like Mauritius and Cayman Islands to buy the franchise and the players through auctions that went into making IPL one of the world’s richest sporting events and a magnet for international cricketers.

“We’ve found incriminating evidence,” Indian Revenue Service Deputy Director Akhilendu Jadhav said. “We needed to have a look at certain transactions and we have found whatever we were looking for.”

The board president said he had advised Modi not to go public on the holdings of all the franchisees as the IPL Kochi threatened legal action against the board after he had tweeted the ownership details.

“After the names were leaked, I get a communication from (Vivek) Venugopal (partner in Rendezvous) around night saying that there is a Confidentiality Clause in the agreement, which had been signed between the board and them and there is a serious breach of obligation on part of the board.

“I said the issue is complicated and needs detailed deliberations and has legal implications and hence it should be discussed and considered by the Governing Council meeting in Mumbai. The other members of the governing council also agreed with me and so did Modi.”