Yesterday, ICC chairman N Srinivasan, his son-in-law, Gurunath Meiyappan, Raj Kundra, and IPL COO Sundar Raman were issued notices by the Supreme Court after their names were included by the Mudgal Committee in the IPL fixing scandal of 2013. In our August 2014 issue, Rahul Bhatia profiled the ICC chairman and chronicled his rise to the top of India’s cricket administration. This excerpt from ‘Beyond the Boundary,’ tracks the events that led to the formation of the Mudgal Committee and how Srinivasan continued conducting his business.
[I]n recent months, Srinivasan’s rapid ascent up the leaderboards of cricket administration had slowed. Since May 2013, practically every newspaper and news channel in India had clamoured for Srinivasan’s resignation from the BCCI after his son-in-law, Gurunath Meiyappan, a senior official for the Chennai Super Kings, was arrested on the charge that he had placed illegal bets on IPL games. Mumbai police suspected that Gurunath had leaked confidential team information to fixers. At a raucous press conference, Srinivasan insisted that Gurunath, whose family owned Chennai’s oldest movie studio, was simply “very enthusiastic.” But the din of the unbelievers kept swelling. For two months, newspapers reserved front-page space for Srinivasan, whose assessing eyes stared coldly out at the nation from his photographs. Finally, in June 2013, he offered to “step aside”—a kind-of, not-quite resignation.
Investigators handpicked by the BCCI soon cleared him and Gurunath of any wrongdoing, and Srinivasan resumed office in September. But even as he carried on—pausing only occasionally to tell reporters to “stop hounding” him—in October the Supreme Court acted on a petition filed by the Cricket Association of Bihar which contended that, with Srinivasan in charge of the BCCI, a meaningful inquest could not be expected. The court appointed a retired high-court judge, Mukul Mudgal, to investigate the allegations credibly.
The considerable weight of all this scrutiny bore down on Srinivasan as he entered the ICC meeting in January. His counterparts from other national boards were wary. They were all well-versed in the arts of surviving the vagaries of power—the fixture from Zimbabwe is Robert Mugabe’s man—but Srinivasan was more than a match for them. He always prepared well for meetings, he could think like an accountant, he kept his advisors close, and almost never failed to ensure that his supporters were happy and well-rewarded.
Three different people—a prominent cricket commentator, an editor at a popular sports website, and an ICC official—told me as much in interviews. “I haven’t known any BCCI secretary or president reading meeting papers as thoroughly as Srinivasan,” the ICC official said. “He’s more prepared than anyone else.” The official did not wish to be named; when we spoke in March, it seemed certain to him that Srinivasan, in spite of the quagmire of corruption charges threatening him at home, would soon be his new boss. News had already broken that the ICC was resurrecting a lapsed office, that of chairman—a step above the president and the CEO—and it was all but confirmed that Srinivasan would be its newest occupant.
The January meeting began with the chairmen of the English and Australian boards explaining a new plan, and then explaining themselves. The Financial and Commercial Affairs Committee of the ICC, one of four committees on which Srinivasan sat, was introducing a proposal to radically reorganise the council, and so revise the balance of power in international cricket. “India, England, and Australia,” the tabled document stated, “have agreed that they will provide greater leadership at and of the ICC.” Put plainly, the three biggest markets in global cricket would manage the cricketing affairs of the ICC’s more than one hundred member nations.
Then came the money talk. The document explained that India contributed 80 percent of the ICC’s revenues. The next largest market, England, had a single-digit share. “The current revenue model is lopsided,” Srinivasan told his unsettled listeners. “India gets the same amount as Bangladesh and Zimbabwe.” To bring some balance to the distribution of profits, he suggested, 25 percent of the organisation’s global revenues would go into India’s purse.
A Pakistani official present that day recalled that the representatives of England and Australia seemed oddly apologetic. They said, as he remembered it, that “this proposal was the only way of keeping India within the international tent.” (The official declined to be identified because, he said, “we are trying to improve our relationship with the BCCI.”) Foreseeing resistance from the other administrators, the big three had packed an Excel table, full of spectacular revenue projections, into their 21-page vision document. They pointed out that they expected the ICC to earn from $1.5 billion to $3.5 billion between 2015 and 2023. From 2007 to 2015, they estimated, the ICC’s revenues would total $2 billion. These riches would be shared among the member nations (which meant, first and foremost, that the richest boards had every chance of getting richer). Najam Sethi, the chairman of the Pakistan Cricket Board at the time, waved away all this talk; it was clear under the proposal that the three big boards would control all meaningful decision-making. “This is a take-it-or-leave-it situation for us,” Sethi reportedly told the gathering.
The proposal to modify the ICC’s power structure simply represented, at the highest level, what was more or less Srinivasan’s modus operandi wherever he worked. As president of the Tamil Nadu Cricket Association, he had used an absolute majority of loyalists to remove term limits; this year, he was elected chairman of the group for the fourteenth consecutive time. As president of the BCCI, he altered rules that barred elected representatives from seeking re-election. At every step, he had succeeded by pushing the boundaries with little regard for popular opinion.
In February this year, the Mudgal commission published its report on the IPL spot-fixing charges, making grave allegations of wrongdoing against Srinivasan, as well as twelve others. A Supreme Court bench called it “nauseating” that Srinivasan was still in power at the BCCI, and barred him from the presidency of the organisation until it could complete further investigation into the allegations. Then, on 26 June, Srinivasan was elected the chairman of the ICC unopposed. No Indian cricket administrator had come so far, leaving so much chaos in the wake of his ambition.
An extract from ‘Beyond the Boundary,’ published in The Caravan’s August 2014 issue. Read the story in full here.