Fearing more legal trouble, top Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) officials on Friday convinced N Srinivasan to abandon his desperate bid to return as Board president, a post he had to step aside from after his son-in-law Gurunath Meiyappan was arrested in the wake of the IPl spot-fixing scam.
Jagmohan Dalmiya has been “requested” to continue as interim president and run the day-to-day affairs of the Board for now and a decision has been taken to move Supreme Court seeking the quashing of the HC order on the BCCI probe panel report on the spot fixing scam. In fine print this means that Srinivasan’s return as Board Presient has become even more remote as his term ends in September this year and an AGM is scheduled only in that month. However, if the Supreme Court rules in favour of the BCCI probe report and quashes the HC order, an emergency working committee meeting can be called to mull over Srinivasan’s return.
The BCCI also called off its working committee meeting, which was to be chaired by Srinivasan, in respect to the Bombay High Court’s order calling the probe “illegal and unconstitutional”. The probe panel had given a clean chit to Meiyappan and Rajasthan Royals co-owner Raj Kundra. “At its meeting in Delhi earlier today, the IPl Governing Council (Mr N Srinivasan having recused himself) considered at length the issues arising from the Bombay High Court’s order regarding the constitution of the probe commission, which was formed to investigate the complaints made by the BCCI against India Cements limited, Jaipur IPl Cricket Private limited, Mr. Gurunath Meiyappan and Mr Raj Kundra,” BCCI secretary Sanjay Patel said after the meeting at a five star hotel in the Capital.
“As a matter of principle, the members confirmed that it was important that the Governing Council’s actions be seen to be both legally and ethically correct. The Governing Council believes that the probe commission was properly constituted in accordance with IPl Operational Rules and has consequently decided that an appeal should be filed in Supreme Court. This decision having been made, Mr N Srinivasan rejoined the meeting and, in the light of the pending appeal in Supreme Court, requested Mr Dalmiya to continue discharging his functions for the present,” he added.
The BCCI’s Game Development Manager Ratnakar Shetty later said that vice-president Arun Jaitley had explained the court order in detail to the IPl governing council members and, based on that, the council decided to maintain status quo. “Mr Jaitley explained the important points of the court order. There was a discussion in the committee and the members decided to file a Special leave Petition in Supreme Court,” he said.
Initially, Srinivasan was adamant about returning as president and it took Jaitley, IPl chairman Rajiv Shukla and Dalmiya a couple of hours to make him abandon his comeback bid. They apprised the Tamil Nadu strongman about the possibility of legal and administrative backlash and more resignations if he tried to force his way despite the court ruling.
According to a source, two of the five vice-presidents threatened resignation if Srinivasan chaired the WC meeting. After consulting his legal team, he decided to call off the meeting. However, there was another ‘technical’ problem with the notice of the meeting. Having been called within four days of the previous WC meeting, the notice should have had ‘emergent’ word in it. “The meeting was called off as there was a slight mistake in issuing the notice. By mistake the word ‘emergent’ was not written,” Patel said after the day’s proceedings got over. “A normal working committee meeting requires more time. Unfortunately it was just four days time. To avoid the technicality of it, the meeting was cancelled,” he said.