Shady IPL: Rot runs deeper than Tharoor, Praful Patel

Conflict of interest has become the single most relevant term that is synonymous with Indian cricket in 2016. The conflict of interest phenomenon has shaped how ethics in cricket are to be determined. If that isn’t a familiar theme for Indian cricket, one wonders what possibly is.

In an extremely short span of just a few months, two of India’s iconic cricketers, a current BCCI official, and other former players have already been faced with conflict of interest hearings in front of the ombudsman, Justice AP Shah.

Sourav Ganguly was involved in a PIL by a gentleman who questioned Ganguly’s conflict of interest with regard to the bidding process for the interim franchises. Ganguly is a minority stakeholder in the Indian Super League (ISL) club Atlético de Kolkata whose majority partner is Sanjiv Goenka’s New Rising, which successfully bid for the Pune IPL franchise.

Ganguly’s place in the IPL governing council and his failure to recuse himself from the process was questioned, but given the nature of how the process unfolded, and also the fact that he had virtually no role to play in the choosing of the successful franchises, the ombudsman didn’t feel there was any conflict.

The decision does appear to be the right one, but given that Ganguly’s role in the governing council will include sitting in on matters that involve franchises, including the Pune franchise, this issue may come up soon again.

The second conflict of interest matter had a different verdict altogether and related to whether or not there was a conflict for Harbhajan Singh with regard to the clothing brand Bhajji Sports that provides apparel to six Ranji teams, although Singh has stated that his mother owns the company, not he.

Justice Shah disagreed and directed Singh to relinquish his role in the company and provide a clear undertaking to the board to eliminate any conflict of interest.

There are other forms of conflict of interest in this category: former players employed by the BCCI-IPL who hold positions as television commentators, or who serve dual roles as team mentors or brand ambassadors of franchises while also serving in a capacity as team selectors or coaches for the BCCI.

Sunil Gavaskar, Ravi Shastri, Anil Kumble, and Sourav Ganguly were mentioned even by the BCCI in its submission to the court.

Justice Lodha Committee’s recommendation was to exclude ministers and government officials from the board’s administration. The current IPL chairman, Rajeev Shukla, is a politician. The secretary of the BCCI, Anurag Thakur, is a politician. A member of the present IPL governing council, Jyotiraditya Scindia, is a politician.

Former BCCI president and the current nominee for the ICC, if Manohar is unavailable, Sharad Pawar, is a politician. Many of the state associations’ presidents or board members are politicians. Quite a few of them have done good work, most recently Thakur.

But the politician-cricket official dual role has caused concern to the judiciary, to the public at large, and to the reputation of cricket and the IPL. It has also been the cause of many of the conflict of interest controversies,

For the IPL, the conflict of interest controversy took centre stage during the spot-fixing scandal, but the first great fiasco in the IPL happened much earlier than that. The franchise expansion auction of the IPL was both its biggest success and, soon after, its biggest failure.

I have already detailed the Kochi franchise’s story and its eventual collapse. The Kochi franchise was a primary example of conflict of interest, and an extremely warped set of events. There was a lot more to it than just the sweat-equity component.

Sundar Raman for an extended period of time was on the hot seat for his alleged closeness to a bookie, and his influential role in the BCCI facilitated by Srinivasan. He was recruited by Lalit Modi when the IPL began in 2008. Even after Modi’s suspension and eventual ban, Raman continued his service to the league.

It was only once Shashank Manohar, who had in the past questioned Raman’s continuing presence in the IPL, returned to head the BCCI that Raman resigned. The timing of the resignation was such that it happened prior to the Justice Lodha Committee’s final order on the functioning of the BCCI and its officials, and it perhaps raised the eyebrows of those closely following this entire episode.

Raman had thus far merely been questioned, although the questioning by the court was quite pointed. He needn’t have worried. The Justice Lodha Committee, in its report, cleared Raman of any wrongdoing, and the Supreme Court accepted the recommendation. Interestingly, Manohar had earlier said this about Raman:

"Raman should have gone immediately after the Mudgal Committee report found him prima facie guilty of wrongdoing. He ought to have stepped down immediately at that time. Now, to restore the faith of people in IPL and the game, Raman needs to go..."

Raman had an interesting role in Kochi’s pre-auction due diligence. A few days before the bids for the two new franchises closed, an email went out from Raman to an employee of the IPL.

The email contained revenue projections for potential franchises in the expansion auction. The employee forwarded the email to her father, whose personal assistant then forwarded the same email to a friend. The friend was said to be interested in helping an IPL team come to his adopted state, and the information would have been useful in his evaluations.

There are a few things wrong in the scenario, but nothing really outrageous. It was the identities of the individuals in this scenario that caused a huge controversy. Raman sent the email to a "junior employee", whose name happened to be Poorna Patel. He claims that further transmission of the email was neither something that he was aware of nor something he had authorised.

Poorna Patel, as it turns out, is the daughter of the then federal minister for civil aviation, Praful Patel. Patel’s personal assistant forwarded the email to his friend, Shashi Tharoor, who was very actively pitching for the franchise to come to Kochi. Now here’s the rub — the information in the email, besides being extremely confidential, did not paint a rosy picture.

According to the projections, neither of the franchises could reasonably expect to be profitable until the tenth year of their existence at the earliest. A net loss of more than Rs 600 crore was expected according to the projections. Anyone wanting to own the team ought to have been deterred, but the Kochi consortium went ahead anyway, and won the bid.

Later, the projections were declared to be overly pessimistic, and the rumour spread as to how Raman had intentionally directed inaccurate projections to Tharoor via Patel, in an effort to deter the bid. The questions that arose were whether Patel, through his daughter Poorna, was receiving classified information on a potential bid he was looking to make. Patel said he had no such plans, and was merely doing his friend Tharoor a favour by giving the information.

This was puzzling, because if the information wasn’t classified, it needn’t have been specially requested of the IPL’s upper management. There were more questions than answers after this came into the public domain, and the high-profile nature of this was attributed to the political nature of the controversy.

The conflict of interest component was intrinsic but not proven, primarily because it became moot. Tharoor had to resign, and the issue remained one of sweat equity and eventually of the termination of the franchise.