New Delhi:
The Indian Premier League (IPL) has clarified that the documents emailed to Shashi Tharoor were not confidential and that anybody who wanted to bid on an IPL team at last month's auction could have asked for these spreadsheets.
IPL CEO Sundar Raman has also stressed that while the documents were sent by Poorna Patel, daughter of Civil Aviation Minister Praful Patel, it was Tharoor who requested them.
Poorna works for the IPL as a Hospitality Manager.
The clarifications issued by Raman beg a big question. If the documents were indeed available to any interested party, why did Tharoor feel the need to call a fellow minister, one who says he has no real link to cricket, other than his daughter serving as a junior employee for the IPL.
What Shashi Tharoor received were projections for the kind of business a new IPL team might do. The bottomline: not good. The math seems suspicious to many because it suggests that new franchise would not make money for ten years.
The numbers didn't intimidate the group that Tharoor was mentoring. It went ahead with its bid, and to the surprise of many, won a franchise for Kochi in Tharoor's home state of Kerala.
Tharoor has been forced to resign after IPL Commissioner Lalit Modi unloaded on twitter some damaging revelations: that the Kochi group's real ownership was not clear, and that Tharoor's girlfriend, Sunanda Pushkar, had got sweat equity worth 70 crores.
In Parliament on Friday, the Opposition came together to challenge the Congress that it is shielding Patel and Sharad Pawar, whose Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) is a key ally in the UPA government.
Both NCP ministers have been accused of inappropriate links to the IPL and have denied that they financially benefit in any way from the IPL. Patel, in fact, has told NDTV that he does not have any link to the IPL, or to cricket.
Patel's party has defended him, stating that the documents he sent were not forwarded by his government office or email ID. It had also stressed that Poorna simply forwarded the documents sent to her by the IPL CEO.