Fixed!: Cash and Corruption in Cricket

By Shantanu Guha Ray

How illegal cash is destroying the fabric of cricket
Who killed Hansie Cronje and Bob Woolmer? Have players from the national squad been involved in match-fixing? Is suspending IPL teams punishment enough for erring franchise owners? Should betting be made legal in India as advised by the Lodha Committee? From S. Sreesanth to Chris Cairns, Lalit Modi to N. Srinivasan, Hamid Cassim to Tinku Mandi, Shantanu Guha Ray examines the allegations of corruption against players, cricket administrators and bookies alike. He interviews the myriad people who linger in the shadows of players' dressing rooms - the middle men, agents, 'friends' of IPL franchise owners - placing bets on games and enticing cricketers to reveal inside information for money, sex or, worse, fear for their lives. Also under the spotlight are the roles of the police and the government, who have, at best, made patchy efforts to stem the rot. Fixed!: Cash and Corruption in Cricket is an incisive, unflinching look at the underbelly of what once used to be a gentleman's game.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperSport
• Release date: Feb 10, 2016
• ISBN: 9789351773863

Shantanu Guha Ray

Shantanu Guha Ray is a Wharton-trained journalist who has spent nearly three decades in the profession. He is the India editor of Central European News, a Vienna-based wire agency, and is a regular contributor to Firstpost.

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INTRODUCTION

On 14 June 2015, former Chief Justice of India R.M. Lodha held a press conference in Delhi to announce his decision to ban two teams—Chennai Super Kings (CSK) and Rajasthan Royals (RR)—from the world’s most expensive cricket league, the Indian Premier League (IPL), for two years.

More than a hundred journalists—television reporters jostling for space with those from print, news agencies and portals—spoke together, raising the decibel level to a pitch that forced Lodha, at times, to cover his ears. Everyone wanted to know more than what Lodha had announced.

And Lodha, for all practical purposes, was not ready to oblige.

He had already suspended the franchisees of two of the league’s most successful teams for bringing ‘the game into disrepute’. It meant that under its existing ownership, CSK and RR, who had between them three IPL titles, would not be part of the league for some time.

Television channels played breaking news—the court order had shaken up Indian and world cricket. The three-member panel had also handed life bans to Chennai’s and Rajasthan’s key officials, Gurunath Meiyappan and Raj Kundra respectively, that prevented them from participating in any cricket-related activity in the future. They had been found guilty of betting on matches and passing on information to bookmakers.

Meiyappan is the son-in-law of N. Srinivasan, former International Cricket Council (ICC) chairman and president of the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI), and also the managing director of India Cements Limited. Raj Kundra, a successful businessman and husband of actor Shilpa Shetty, had an 11.7 per cent stake in Rajasthan Royals.

Justice Lodha, flanked by justices Ashok Bhan and R.V. Raveendran, began by punching holes in the defendants’ arguments. ‘Disrepute has been brought to cricket to such an extent that doubts abound in the public whether the game is clean or not. The fact that Gurunath was an integral part of CSK and most people saw him as the face of the team, he ought not to have indulged in betting practices,’ Justice Lodha said, reading out the verdict. ‘That the allegation of match-fixing against Kundra was not finally established does not matter because his status as owner has brought disrepute to the game. The argument that these acts were personal and the franchise cannot be responsible cannot be accepted,’ concluded the committee, set up in January 2015 to decide on the quantum of punishment. The decision, for all practical purposes, was final and binding, Justice Lodha explained. ‘The Supreme Court order says it is subject to any remedy in appropriate judicial proceedings, so a challenge is available in court. But since this is a committee comprising three senior judges of the Supreme Court, it is highly unlikely a court will interfere.’

Lodha said he would probe more and submit another report later. He did that in January 2016.

Former Justice Mukul Mudgal, who had conducted the first probe into the IPL illegal betting and spot-fixing scandal, had submitted another report in 2015.

This one was triggered by the demand of the Aam Admi Party-led government in Delhi to probe the Delhi and District Cricket Association (DDCA), and more importantly, its long-time boss, the current finance minister Arun Jaitley. AAP accused Jaitley of abetting rampant corruption in the DDCA and blamed him for ‘deliberately overlooking the scandals and scams in the cricket body’. Outraged, Jaitley—he had seasoned journalist Rajat Sharma as his Man Friday in the courts—filed a Rs 100 crore defamation suit against AAP in a Delhi Court.

But, interestingly, the Mudgal report on the DDCA supported the AAP stand, and castigated the cricket body for a large number of ills. The twenty-seven-page report, submitted to the Delhi High Court which had appointed him in November 2015 to oversee the fourth Test between India and South Africa at Feroz Shah Kotla, blamed DDCA for lack of transparency, poor record-keeping, huge delays in bill payments and mismanagement.

I went for a coffee at Choko La, a small eatery in Delhi’s Khan Market. I had called my source to seek an update from him.

The source walked in with a smile and told me: ‘Don’t think that the AAP complaint is enough. A lot is still under the carpet.’

It is now widely known that a London-based detective agency was asked in 2013-14 to tap the phones of many officials of the BCCI, including those probing the 2013 IPL spot-fixing and betting scandal. The then BCCI president N. Srinivasan was the one who had paid the agency a whopping Rs 14 crore for the job.

What was the desperation? I asked.

Probably Srinivasan wanted to know if his own men were plotting against him and where the probe was heading towards.

Has it ever happened before?

No, the source replied. Even a decade ago, the situation was not so bad within the BCCI. But now, those controlling the cricket board want power with unflinching loyalty. Even if there is an iota of suspicion, it is tracked and nipped in the bud. The question was: Why wasn’t Srinivasan a part of the Mudgal probe? Mudgal and his men had questioned a number of cricketers and bookies—but how come they left out the man who was at the centre of the whole narrative?

I almost fell from the chair. The thought had not struck me earlier. Two high-level probes, yet investigations had revealed little, skimming just the surface and nabbing the small fry.

Despite cricket being almost next to religion in India, I realized the issue of corruption in cricket—very surprisingly—was hardly ever debated in Parliament. Why wouldn’t the members of the Upper House and Lower House debate an issue as serious as spot-fixing and illegal betting? I remembered how cops in Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, Jaipur and Delhi had told me that their biggest concern was that in recent years illegal betting syndicates had developed powerful connections in the right corridors.

So how does the industry work?

It is an extremely secretive and complex network that works at various levels. For example, Indian bookies are known for picking up exotic locations to hoodwink the cops. Some take satellite phones and work out of villages, others bribe cops and work right next to the stadium, some set up shop in the top floors of fancy five-star hotels where there’s minimal movement of guests. In two recent cases in Mumbai, bookies camouflaged themselves as members of an investor forum discussing the ills of real estate business in the city. While they discussed illegal cash and who will fix which player and team—it was before the 2014 edition of the IPL—the cops happily guarded the venue.

The network of bookies runs very, very deep across the world. It works like a well-oiled machine, almost like the simulation system of a jet engine. There are plenty of back-ups in place, and hardly much scope for failure. The word of mouth is sacrosanct, and cash is delivered within seconds.

Above them are the people who manage a group of bookies that operate in various parts of a city or a state. In India, for example, the nation is divided into five zones: east, south, north, west and central. These five zones are further divided into ten mini-zones, and those mini-zones are divided into thirty sub-mini zones. Those who head these zones get information and odds from a completely different set of individuals who are above them in the chain. The industry—non-existent on paper—is structured in such a way that it makes it extremely difficult, even impossible, for people on the ground, the bookies, to know the ones operating in the layers above them in the chain of command.

Praveen Ranjan, a top cop who worked for the Delhi Police and the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) before being posted as Inspector General, Puducherry, narrated this one.

It happened in the Indian capital. Ranjan was approached by the harassed father of a school-going son whose indulgence in betting had become a concern. The student, rusticated from St George School in south Delhi because of similar charges, had drawn up a huge loss kitty of Rs 15,00,000 and had to repay the amount. The payment was delayed and threats started coming to the father who approached Ranjan. Eventually, the case was settled by the intervention of the cops who sorted out the crisis amicably. How Ranjan did not share; nor did he talk about the amount of cash eventually paid by the father of the child. ‘It was a strange case, a sad one, which showed how gullible these gamblers can be,’ Ranjan said in an interview in September 2013.

The incident highlighted one factor. Given the widespread nature of match-fixing, the gamblers hardly know if they are being enticed into making a bet whose outcome has already been decided against them.

But who was playing for whom, I asked myself? As I tried to connect the dots, I remembered an incident once narrated to me by a Dubai-based engineer, Aroop Datta, also an avid cricket fan.

In late 1990s, match-fixing storms had enveloped world cricket and several hard-to-believe news reports had flooded the market, some about Indian cricketers. But the one Datta—who has recently published a book of photographs of Narendra Modi—had witnessed himself was at a five-star luxury hotel in Dubai.

It was in 1998, and the hotel was flashing, on a giant screen, names of famous personalities arriving for lunch at the lobby with a ‘Welcome’ note. After a few names, the hotel flashed the name of Dawood Ibrahim who walked in with a friend. Seconds later, Mohammad Azharuddin walked in. After exchanging a few pleasantries, the cricketer collected an envelope from Ibrahim’s friend and left the place. On 31 October 2000, in a damning 162-page report, the CBI blamed Azharuddin for fixing matches along with his teammates and banned him from cricket for life. Interestingly, in the biopic being made on him and to be released soon, the former captain has allowed the director to show the match-fixing phase of his life.

I was more or less convinced that most fixings happened under the noses of those intimately associated with the game. And every time someone inched forward with a probe, he had to take two steps back because of pressures from various sources.

Consider this one. On the morning of 31 March 2015, a key investigator who had probed the IPL spot-fixing scandal learnt in distress that he had not been granted extension to complete his work. Why, asked B.B. Mishra, the top police officer who had been loaned to the (Retd) Justice Mudgal Panel from the Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) for the probe. There were no answers. The BCCI made no comment. His friends in service, including those in the Delhi Police, could not figure out the reason.

Some of them came home to talk to him, and told the cop that it would be worth his while to write a note to former Chief Justice Lodha and seek his intervention. Lodha and his team were looking into the case, trying to take it to the next logical step after the Supreme Court’s two-judge bench of Justices T.S. Thakur and Fakir Mohamed Ibrahim Kalifulla had passed its landmark verdict, removing the near-invincible N. Srinivasan from the top BCCI chair. They had asked him to choose between the board and Chennai Super Kings (in which he had near-total control) and pushed for fresh elections in the board.

Mishra realized this was the best way to move forward. After all, he had no option but to retire on 31 March after the Integrated Finance Department (IFD) of the Ministry of Home Affairs sat for days on his file for an extension and inordinately delayed the process.

Mishra remembered how, totally exasperated, he had repeatedly reminded officials of the IFD to grant the extension but got no answers. The reason for the extension was to help Retd CJ Lodha investigate whether any further probe was required against Sundar Raman, the former IPL COO, who was named by the Mudgal Committee for communicating with bookies during the IPL in 2013.

Raman had contested the claims made by the Mumbai and Delhi Police and denied speaking to the bookie. He even said he had never ever indulged in betting. What sounded strange was claims made by his lawyer in the Supreme Court that Raman, on hearing about bookies infiltrating the IPL, had actually alerted the Dubai-based ICC’s anti-corruption unit. Why? IPL was not even recognized by the ICC and considered a domestic, Indian tournament. So why not call the BCCI?

During his interrogation, Raman repeatedly said he was not in the know of devious happenings in the IPL, which prompted the investigators to ask him whether or not he was the IPL COO. Raman kept quiet, almost in the same way he had kept quiet when he was asked how come there were two addresses of CSK: one in Chennai and one at the new cricket stadium in Ranchi.

Raman was happy to avoid most of the answers but little did he know that Mishra had meticulously gathered details of some of his conversations with Vindu Dara Singh, and Singh’s conversations with Sunil Punter, a top bookie from Dubai during the 2013 IPL.

Not only this, Mishra had investigated the Kundra case too and discovered several leads on him. So it came as a surprise when his request for extension was not granted. What was intriguing was that Home Minister Rajnath Singh—fully aware of the importance of the investigation and the role undertaken by Mishra—said he had been keen to grant him an extension but the ‘issue never reached him so that he could intervene. Was there foul play? Did officers of the IFD deliberately sit on Mishra’s file and wait for his retirement to happen?

When Mishra wrote to Justice Lodha, the latter was keen to accept his service and sought permission from the Supreme Court to retain Mishra but the request was rejected because the police officer had already retired from service.

Justice Lodha, though denied the services of Mishra, would have excellent assistance from Vivek Priyadarshi, a seasoned cop with immaculate track record who had once worked with the CBI. Lodha’s first salvo rattled the BCCI which was left gasping for breath. He gave them an eighty-five-point questionnaire that included many tough ones on appointment of team managers, guests, commentators and media managers.

There was something else intrinsically connected with spot-fixing and betting scandals that stayed away, thankfully, from the glare of the media. And it revolved around a petite reporter, Heena Zuni Pandit, who had done some great investigations for two longs years, starting in 2009, before scooping up a big cricket scandal for the Indian edition of Sports Illustrated.

And then she quietly faded away from journalism, got a degree in Ayurvedic medicine and started practice in a state-owned hospital near Delhi University.

Heena had been involved by Mishra while he had conducted his investigations. She sat in an adjacent room as some of the stars of Indian cricket, their agents and BCCI officials walked in for interrogations. I had talked to Heena on the phone on a number of occasions but met her, for the first time, in April 2015 at a coffee shop near the bustling Delhi University. Bleary-eyed students, in the thick of their annual exams, walked in with huge files and books to order black coffee even as we two discussed Indian cricket’s biggest scandal.

Pandit did not reveal what she had witnessed during the interrogations of the Mudgal Panel. I asked her how come the Sports Illustrated investigation could not be taken to its logical end by the BCCI and the ICC. She laughed, sipped her cold coffee, and said the magazine and its editors had offered the details to the cricket board and its controlling authority. ‘Beyond that was not our domain.’

She remembered the day when the tapes (recordings of bookies) were handed over to Ravi Sawani, a top BCCI anti-corruption official, on 11 May 2011. Once Sawani left, the editors were happy. For them, it was their biggest investigation and Heena was over the moon. But the joy was short-lived. First came a phone call from an anonymous source, threatening her with dire consequences, and then, a day later, on her way home from work, Pandit’s two-wheeler was rammed by a speeding bike. One thing was clear to her: someone had spilled the beans, talked about the investigations carried out by Sports Illustrated. And the leak had happened from within the world’s richest cricket board.

What was worse was that Sawani told the Mudgal panel that he had no tapes, no information from Sports Illustrated, virtually denying his visit to their offices in Gurgaon. Enraged, the editor offered copies of mails exchanged between the magazine and Sawani, proof enough that the top investigator of BCCI had indeed accessed the tapes.

Then Sawani said he could not locate the tapes, much to the surprise of the Mudgal panel. That he had lied was proved and his statement about the tapes missing from the BCCI office was duly recorded.

‘It was clear to me that no one was keen to bell the cat,’ said Heena Pandit.

Another laudable investigation came from The Indian Express when it criticized the BCCI over the appointment of former Delhi Police Commissioner Neeraj Kumar as the chief advisor of its Anti-Corruption and Security Unit, an incident that raised serious conflict of interest issues. The Indian Express revealed that Kumar’s younger daughter, Ankita, a screenplay writer, was linked to at least three business entities promoted by IPL governing council chairman Rajeev Shukla’s wife Anuradha Prasad: E24 Glamour Limited, Skyline Radio Network Limited and News24 Broadcast India Limited.

The charges levelled by the daily were serious, ostensibly because Kumar and Shukla held posts key to fighting corruption in Indian cricket, especially in an environment where spot-fixing and betting continued to

Reviews for Fixed!

[Ramandeep Singh · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Nice and very helpful And I hope you have a great match