The Anti-Extortion Cell (AEC) of the Thane crime branch police on Friday summoned Bollywood actor-producer-director Arbaaz Khan for questioning in the ongoing investigations into the IPl betting scam.
Three days after the investigators arrested leading bookie Sonu Yogendra Jalan, alias Sonu Malad for allegedly providing betting software to five other bookies in the metropolis, erstwhile encounter specialist and current AEC in-charge Pradeep Sharma —through summons sent to the actor-producer’s Band Stand-Bandra residence — asked Arbaaz to join the investigations at 11 am on Saturday.
Sources in the Thane AEC said that Arbaaz’s name had cropped during the interrogation of Sonu Jalan (41) who was arrested on Tuesday in connection with a massive betting racket that the Dombivli police busted on May 16. The police had arrested four bookies--Gautam Savla, Nitin Punjani, Nikhil Sampat, and Khushal Khimji from a shop at Dombivli.
According to sources, Arbaaz — brother of Bollywood superstar Salman Khan — had placed through Jalan bets to the tune of Rs 2.8 crore on IPl matches during recently ended IPl season and lost.
Jalan, who allegedly has links with Karachi-based don Dawood Ibrahim and is a partner in the betting syndicate run by Jr Kolkata, is linked to 80-odd big bookies operating across the country and he also has several celebrities as his clients. He has clients in countries like Afghanistan. Pakistani, South Africa and Saudi Arabia and his gang members run betting rackets in Delhi, Kolkata, Rajasthan and Haryana.
The AEC sleuths have seized a dairy from Jalan containing the details of the fellow bookies and his clients.
During his interrogation by the Thane police, Jalan is understood to have spoken about his relations with Arbaaz who, the former is learned to have confessed, used him as a conduit to place better on IPl matches.
Arbaaz is reportedly owed Jalan to the tune of Rs 3 crore, a debt arising out of the bets that the actor-director-producer placed through the latter. Jalan had reportedly threatened Arbaaz that he would the latter’s name if the latter failed to clear the dues in a stipulated time
Arbaaz is the second film personality to have been linked to betting on cricket. Earlier Bollywood actor Vindoo Dara Singh had been arrested on May 21, 2013 for his alleged links with bookies involved in the IPl spot-fixing scam. The scam allegedly involved the then BCCI chief N Srinivasan’s son-in-law and former team principal of Chennai Super Kings (CSK) Gurunath Meiyappan, Pakistani umpire Asad Rauf, 15 bookies from Pakistan and two Dubai-based bookies. At that time, Meiyappan, used to place bets on IPl T20 matches through Vindoo.
Even at that time, Vindoo allegedly used to be in touch with Jalan — who is understood to have developed a software named ‘Bet and Take’ which had become a rage in the cricket betting circles in India and other countries.
Among other things, unconfirmed reports said that apart from operating a betting syndicate, Jalan admitted to the police that he — along another leading bookie Prem Taneja — had mixed the pitch curator in a 2016 test match between Sri lanka and Australia. The “fixed” pitch produced 21 wickets in a day.
Coincidentally enough, the latest IPl betting scam has surfaced in the backdrop of a recent expose by Al Jazeera’s Investigative Unit about a match—fixer from a crime syndicate who claims to have bribed international cricketers to “under-perform” in Test matches.
Apart making correct predictions about the turn of events in two high-profile Test matches, involving the world’s leading teams, the match-fixer revealed in the Al Jazeera expose that “spot-fixes” were allegedly carried out in
matches between India and England in Chennai in December 2016 and India and Australia at Ranchi in March last year.