While the match-fixing report waits for the final approval of CBI chief R K Raghavan, sources say the agency has sufficient corroborative evidence to indicate that several prominent Indian and some foreign players eceived payments in foreign currency from bookies and deposited the same via the hawala route.
Besides indicating that at least five Indian players were involved in match-fixing, the CBI’s report is expected to contain a mini-directory on the network of bookies. The names and network of at least 200 bookies are expected to be exposed. The CBI has questioned some 50 bookies and included in its findings the statements of around five of them about how they were regularly paying hefty sums of cash and foreign currency to cricketers for under-performing in matches.
The CBI has estimated that betting worth a whopping Rs 300 crore is being done during a one-day international cricket fixture, and not necessarily in a match where India is playing.
Significantly, monitoring of telephones of the bookies revealed that their business remained largely unaffected after the Hansie Cronje scam broke. Some prominent bookies went underground, but records of telephone conversations show that the network remained active throughout the period of investigation.
The CBI will highlight how, over the years, the bookies have begun to rely upon a sophisticated servicing syndicate, run by “dabba” operators in Delhi and Mumbai. CBI sleuths were taken to witness some “dabba” operations in Mumbai where from a central console fitted with a powerful microphone, betting rates can be simultaneously fed to 100 telephone lines. Several of these “dabba” operations, which are actually mini-telephone exchanges, were seen in operation even after the inquiry begun. The owners of the betting centers may or may not have been in league with the bookies themselves.
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Delhi, Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Indore, Calcutta and Lucknow have emerged as major cricket-betting centers of the country. Bookies by the names of Mukesh Gupta (involved in the Cronje scam), Hans, Rampal Rajouri, Pole and Anand Saxena, Rattan Mehta, Mona Mehta, Vikas Sabharwal and Pinky are among the prominent players in Delhi. Among other places, the health club of Hotel Park Royale, frequented by Manoj Prabhakar was found to be a sort of a hub for players and bookies.
For Mumbai, the CBI found Anil Steel, Dalip and Shoban Mehta to be indulging in betting in a big way. In Calcutta, a bookie by the name of Jagmohan and in the case of Ahmedabad, one by the name of Aniya were found to be part of the cricketing sweepstakes.
The CBI has established that the key cricketers were regularly in touch with these bookies during match-playing days and then corroborated this with circumstantial evidence in the form of telephone records, hotel bookings and travel schedules.
