Nigeria Content Online

On Sunday, the Indian Premier League, a wildly successful professional cricket empire with a huge fan following,

holds the final game of its third season.

Whichever team wins – the Mumbai Indians or the Chennai Super Kings – the big loser could be the man who created the league.

On Monday, league
officials are expected to try to oust that executive, Lalit Kumar Modi,
who has been the league’s commissioner since its founding but has
become embroiled in a scandal that has also brought down a senior
government official.

The game has changed

In the past few
years, the IPL has transformed cricket in India from a gentlemanly
sport of tea breaks and daylong matches into a fast-paced, $4
billion-a-year industry hailed as a fitting symbol of India’s rise as
an economic power. The league’s financial and media success was mostly
attributed to Modi.

But a raging scandal, which has exposed a web entangling sports, politics and business in this country, threatens to end
Modi’s winning streak. It might also dash his aspirations for building
the IPL into what he recently called the “single largest league of the
world.”

What started as a
public spat between Modi and a senior lawmaker has quickly evolved into
an investigation by India’s tax authorities into the league’s financial
affairs. The revelations so far suggest that cricket has succumbed to
the same kinds of cronyism and corruption that affect many other parts
of Indian economics and politics.

“We haven’t seen
something as high-profile, as wide-ranging, where the numbers are as
big, in my lifetime,” said Jayaditya Gupta, executive editor of
Cricinfo, a website that tracks the sport.

Earlier this week
Shashi Tharoor, a former top U.N. diplomat, was forced to resign as
junior minister of foreign affairs in the Indian government. That
happened after Modi revealed that a group of businessmen whom Tharoor
had advised as they prepared a winning $333 million bid for a new
cricket league franchise had then given a female friend of Tharoor’s a
free minority stake in their new team.

Vested interests

Tharoor has denied
wrongdoing, saying he merely “mentored” the businessmen so they would
base the team in his home state, Kerala. The winning group, Tharoor
said, gave an ownership slice of less than 5 percent to his friend,
Sunanda Pushkar, separately as payment for her marketing services.

Meanwhile, income
tax agents this week searched the IPL’s headquarters, a suite at the
Four Seasons Hotel in Mumbai where Modi works, as well as the offices
of the league’s eight original teams. The finance minister, Pranab
Mukherjee, promised Parliament a thorough investigation.

The inquiry
includes offshore shell companies through, which shares in the teams
are held. Critics have long asserted that team owners are using these
legal entities to obscure their ownership.

Even before the
scandal surfaced it had become apparent that at least some of the teams
were partly owned by the people responsible for overseeing the league,
or by their families.

The husband of
Modi’s wife’s sister, for instance, owns a big stake in the Rajasthan
Royals franchise. A company controlled by the husband of Modi’s
stepdaughter owns rights to show league games on the Internet and
mobile phones, and he holds a stake in another team, the Kings XI
Punjab. Other sports officials involved in overseeing the league also
own teams.

In an interview,
Modi, 46, denied that he had done anything wrong. He said his relatives
invested in the IPL three years ago because they had faith in him.

“In the beginning,
nobody wanted to come in,” he said as he smoked a Dunhill cigarette on
a terrace of the Grand Hyatt Hotel here. “All the people who came in
were friends and family who believed in the idea. The entire media said
this was a lousy investment, it’s not going to work.”

Even his critics
acknowledged that Modi, who previously helped bring ESPN and Disney to
India as their local partner, had succeeded where others had failed.

Cricket is as
important to Indians as basketball, football and baseball combined are
to Americans. But officials who oversaw the sport were never able to
fully exploit its appeal.

Modi said when he
first joined the organisation that oversaw the sport, the Board of
Control for Cricket in India, it collected just $300,000 in revenue per
match, primarily from ticket sales and broadcasting rights.

Now, he said, each
of the 56 league games a season brings in an average of $30 million.
Games attract audiences of 20,000 to 55,000 depending on the stadium.
On television, the current season has reached about 138 million
viewers, up from 121 million last year, according to TAM Media Research.

The cricket board,
a nonprofit organisation that is often run by politicians but is not an
arm of the government, began aggressively promoting cricket after
Sharad Pawar became its president in 2005. Besides being a government
minister, Pawar runs an important regional political party. As
president of the cricket board, he authorized Modi, who had proposed a
city-based league in the early 1990s, to start the IPL.

Modi’s flamboyant
promotion of the league, complete with red-carpet celebrities and
foreign cheerleaders, many from Eastern Europe and Australia, attracted
the wealthy and powerful to cricket.

Getting carried away

Mukesh Ambani, the
country’s richest man, bought the Mumbai Indians franchise. The
country’s most popular movie actor, Shah Rukh Khan, took a big stake in
the Kolkata Knight Riders and cheers them on from the sidelines of
every game.

Sony, which
broadcasts IPL’s two-month season on cable and satellite, is paying
$1.6 billion for the rights for nine years. Earlier this year, the
highest bid in an auction for two new teams was $370 million – up from
the top bid of $112 million three years ago when the first eight teams
were sold.

While Modi claims the league is profitable, he and his patrons refuse to disclose financial statements.

Contracts for
Internet rights have been negotiated in private, rather than being bid
out in auctions. And the league has often forced changes to the terms
of auctions and contracts once they were under way.

“There is a feeling
that the IPL is a wonderful economic mammoth that has been created,”
said Prem Panicker, a veteran Indian writer who has followed cricket
for many years. “But much of it is smoke and mirrors.”

In a television
interview, one Indian cricket official brushed off the more existential
questions about the league but acknowledged that the board had done a
poor job supervising it.

“We should have
been aware of what was happening,” Mansoor Ali Khan Pataudi, a member
of the board’s governing council, told NDTV. “The fact that we didn’t
question anything is because we were carried away with how well
everything was going.”

2010 New York Times News Service