New Delhi: BCCI President and Union Minister Sharad Pawar has thrown in another twist to the tale, disclosing that key members of the Kochi consortium wanted the team to be based out of Ahmedabad instead of Kochi.
Pawar said four members of the consortium met him with a request to help them in transferring the Kochi team to Ammedabad. This is for the first time the Union Minister has spoken out on the controversy. But he declined to name them.
Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi who is the President of the Gujarat Cricket Board, also says the investors had met him for an IPL team based in the state. This was before the consortium won the bid for a team in Kochi.
Modi threatens to sue:
IPL Commissioner Lalit Modi is in no mood to let those accusations pass. He has threatened to sue Rendezvous for defamation. The IPL boss says he will take Rendezvous to court for saying that he offered them $ 50 milion to quit the franchise.
Rendezvous may find it hard to substantiate its allegations and its ownership of the Kochi franchise may run into rough weather. Sources in the BCCI have told CNN-IBN that the board is upset with the allegations against Lalit Modi and will now take a call on the future of the franchise.
Those allegations of a bribe offer notwithstanding, Kochi team says they are willing to work with Modi.
Replying to the bribery charges, Modi said: "I can't bribe any body to give me the franchise because I am not a bidder in the first place, number two is there would be no reason for me to give them a bribe because automatically there would be a cancellation of the tender and it would go to a new tender. I don't know where they're coming with this imaginative figure from."
"I don't know what he's talking about as far as the threat from the D company is concerned. I have no idea what threats they are, what sort of threats they are. Everybody knows the threat I go through, and I am going through every day, the police commissioner of every city knows what threat I am going through, therefore I don't know what they are talking about," Modi added.
"We asked for authentication of the shareholders, all the shareholders were sitting there, we asked for the four shareholders who we did not know who they were, we asked the existing shareholders sitting in the room who they were, they weren't able to answer the question. Mr Gaekwad then called up to ask who these four shareholders were because I wanted to authenticate the same. The minutes were being noted down by Mr Sunadraman, the BCCI lawyer was doing that and within a minute I get a call from Mr Shashi Tharoor asking why I was asking about Sunanda Pushkar and all the other three shareholders. I said it was my job and what have you got to do with the whole issue in the first place," Modi said further.
"All my office people were there, they heard my side of the conversation, and the conversation was being noted down by Mr Sundarraman."
One of the other bidders who lost at the auction for the Kochi IPL team was the Adani Group.
"We had submitted a bid for IPL. It was lower than the rest. We have nothing to do with either the Congress or the BJP," said Adani group spokesperson Devender Amin.
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