N Srinivasan’s fate in balance as Supreme Court reserves verdict

The Supreme Court on Wednesday reserved its judgment on the fate of ousted BCCI chief N Srinivasan.

N Srinivasan’s fate now hangs in balance.

The Supreme Court on Wednesday reserved its judgment on the fate of ousted BCCI chief N Srinivasan and also on the issue whether those having commercial interests in the IPL could continue as BCCI officials in the wake of raging controversy over conflict of interest. Apart from Srinivasan and others whose names cropped up during the IPL 2013 corruption case, the judgment is likely to also impact personalities like Sunil Gavaskar, Sourav Ganguly, Ravi Shastri, Krishnamachari Srikkanth, Lalchand Rajput and Venkatesh Prasad, who are associated with IPL, besides their role in the BCCI.

A list with the names of these individuals were furnished to a bench of Justices T S Thakur and FMI Kalifulla by the BCCI in pursuant to a court poser as to how many BCCI officials had commercial stakes in the IPL and whether there were situations when such interests overlapped with conflict of interest.

BCCI counsel C A Sundaram submitted the list, looking at which the bench observed that in certain cases, reconciliation between commercial interest and conflict of interest appeared difficult and regretted that the BCCI never endeavoured to evolve a procedure to address such situations.

It asked how Srikkanth, who was a mentor for IPL team Sunrise Hyderabad, continued as a national team selector and whether the dual role would not attract conflict of interest situation. The bench further sought a clear-cut definition of “commercial interest” and asked if playing for the national team was a commercial activity or not. The court also asked if commentary was a commercial activity.

Sundaram replied that if the activity in question was the prime source of livelihood of an individual, it would come under the ambit of a commercial activity. He, however, avoided the court’s query if players of the national team were up for sale. The bench then noted that there were indeed incidents of “deep-rooted” conflict of interest and it wondered why it never occurred to the BCCI to put in place a mechanism to redress such situations.

“It has seriously affected the game and ultimately, the entire image is dented because of such issues. Unfortunately, no system was ever evolved by you. Difficulty is that the rules were amended to bring about a situation where such issues were bound to rise,” said the court.

The court was hearing arguments on the validity of the 2008 amendment in the BCCI Rules. Amended Rule 6.2 excluded IPL and Champions League from the purview of conflict of interest and enabled BCCI office bearers to also own and promote teams for the two events.

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Sundaram and Kapil Sibal, who appeared for Srinivasan, however said that not all instances of commercial interests would tantamount to conflict of interest and there had to be specific reasons to state that a particular situation has given rise to such a predicament. Sibal asserted that no malice had been attributed to his client by any of the probe panels and that it was Srinivasan’s efforts that got the games to the villages and brought in more money in the hands of the players, a lot of whom were from small towns and villages.

The court, before reserving its order, heard advocate Nalini Chidambaram, who appeared for petitioner Cricket Association of Bihar. She maintained that Srinivasan must be debarred from contesting for the post of BCCI president since his conflict of interest was apparent from involvement of his son-in-law Gurunath Meiyappan in betting. Chidambaram added Chennai Super Kings should also be banned from the IPL.

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