Leading sports management firm IMG officials met Board of Control for Cricket in India bigwigs in Mumbai on Monday apparently to provide details of financial dealings during suspended Indian Premier League chairman Lalit Modi’s tenure.
“We had a friendly and constructive meeting with the BCCI. We are hoping to have good relations with them,” IMG senior vice president Andrew Wildblood said following a two-hour long meeting with board president Shashank Manohar, secretary N. Srinivasan, interim IPL chairman Chirayu Amin among others.
The meeting was called by the BCCI to retrieve detailed information on matters relating to IPL, including the awarding of the global broadcast rights to Multi Screen Media-World Sports Group, sources said.
Incidentally, the meeting occurred less than 48 hours after Modi sent a voluminous 12,000-page reply against the charges of financial irregularity pressed by the board.
The IMG officials are believed to have apprised the board about the modalities followed for franchise bids, media rights and player auctions besides the contentious facilitation fee issue.
The facilitation fee of $80 million was given by Singapore-based Multi Screen Media to Mauritius-based WSG, who had jointly bid for the 10-year global media rights in 2008 for a whopping $1.026 billion.s
This was after the deal had after the BCCI cancelled MSM’s bid for breaking contractual clauses and then re-negotiated the deal for Rs 8,200 crores for nine years
The board in March last year had ended its contract with MSM and entered into a new contract with Mauritius-based WSG, that was challenged in court by the former. The court proceedings were, however, dropped after the facilitation fee was provided by MSM to WSG as part of an out-of-court settlement.
Meanwhile, BCCI chief administrative officer Ratnakar Shetty said that the meeting was to gather information about last season’s IPL and chart out its future course.
“This was a meeting which the BCCI and IPL interim chairman Chirayu Amin were keen to have, about last season’s IPL and continuing it further. The BCCI president was also involved in the meeting,” Shetty said.
Shetty, however, rubbished reports which suggested that the meeting was to discuss IMG’s agreement with IPL.
“There was a lot of speculation in the media about the agreement and its continuation. There was no discussion on the agreement with IMG because it’s already there for 10 years. Today’s discussion was not about that,” he said in Mumbai.