The presence of BCCI Secretary N. Srinivasan at the IPL auction at Bangalore reportedly has not gone down well with some of the franchises. This has been stated in a section of the media without being attributed to any of the team owners.
The BCCI, however, mulled over it and took a ‘conscientious decision' to make sure that Mr. Srinivasan was present at the auction. This did not happen without the knowledge of BCCI President Shashank Manohar.
The reason, as explained by a senior BCCI official, was based on a number of summons received from revenue and tax departments of the Government of India since April, 2010. The government agencies were seeking full information on the IPL, right from the Invitation to Tender (bid documents) that gave team ownership to the first eight franchises, the contracts signed by the IPL and also full details of franchises.
“All the summons from the Income-Tax department, Enforcement Directorate and other government departments, seeking details of IPL were addressed to the BCCI secretary.
He had to respond to them because the IPL is a sub-committee of the BCCI. Mr. Srinivasan was at the auction as secretary of the BCCI,” said the official.
“When the Income-Tax officials conducted a survey at the BCCI office in mid April 2010 to ascertain bid document details in connection with the Kochi and Pune franchise, the BCCI did not even have a scrap of paper, both at the BCCI and the IPL office.
“Immediately the IT officials came with a search warrant and since then the BCCI has had to respond to queries from the IT and ED departments,” he said.
After suspending Lalit Modi as chairman of the IPL, the BCCI has taken measures to take full control of the IPL and has even reconstituted the governing council, convened working committees to ratify the decisions taken by the GC and also placed it before its annual general meeting.
Internal investigation
The BCCI also set up an internal investigation into the happenings in IPL since 2008, to examine details that perhaps only Mr. Modi and IMG knew about.
Now the BCCI has attempted to put an effective monitoring system in place and when it was time for the auction, it made sure its secretary was present there.
