Daily News

New Delhi: Seeking to clear the air, interim IPL chairman Chirayu Amin said Friday he was approached by a group of businessmen to join them in a consortium to bid for the Pune franchise about which he had written a letter to BCCI president Shashank Manohar.

Reacting to ousted IPL commissioner Lalit Modi's claim that Amin was part of the consortium that made an unsuccessful bid for the Pune franchise in March this year, he said in a statement, "I was approached by a group of businessmen to join them in the consortium to bid for the Pune franchise. I agreed to invest up to 10 percent from one of our associate companies." "Before participating in the bid I wrote a letter to BCCI President Shashank Manohar in this regard and also stated in my letter that further clearance would be taken from the BCCI before investing, in case the bid was successful. There was, therefore, total transparency at every step," he argued.

Earlier in the day, Modi had claimed that Amin was a member of the consortium headed by Aniruddha Deshpande, Managing Director of City Corporation in which Sharad Pawar and his family had 16 per cent shares, which unsuccessfully bid for the Pune franchise.

"There were three members in the consortium that was part of the bid. They were Aniruddha, Akruti and Chirayu Amin," said Modi, whose suspension saw Amin being appointed as the interim IPL chairman.

"It's a fact of life and I cannot change or distort facts. They were the bidders, one can't change that," Modi said.

Amin, a Vadodara-based industrialist who heads the Baroda Cricket Association, was named the interim chairman in April after Modi was suspended on charges of financial irregularities, including bid-rigging.