Not Out! by Desh Gaurav Sekhi

Author:Desh Gaurav Sekhi [Sekhri, Desh Gaurav]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789385890949
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2016-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

In hindsight, Modi and Raman may not have had much in common despite being part of the founding team that brought the IPL together, but in one goal they seem to have stood united: to ensure that Kochi either became discouraged or was thwarted in its efforts to win a bid for an IPL franchise. 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.5 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 authorized. 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.6 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 INR600 crore was expected according to the projections.7

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. Patel and his daughter were dragged in on a different matter

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