BCCI meeting endorses IPL council decisions

The BCCI's working committee, meeting for the first time since the IPL controversies broke out three weeks ago, has unanimously approved all the decisions taken by the IPL governing council last Monday. Those include the specific decisions pertaining to Lalit Modi, the suspended chairman.

The governing council had, at that meeting, served Modi a showcause notice and given him 15 days - expiring on May 11 - to respond to the five specific charges pressed on him. The charges relate to the 2008 bids for Rajasthan Royals and Kings XI Punjab, the broadcasting deal and the facilitation fee, rigging of bids for new franchises in 2010, the sale of internet rights, and Modi's "behavior".

While the endorsement of those decisions was said to be unanimous, an otherwise routine meeting took a surprising turn when Jagmohan Dalmiya, president of the Cricket Association of Bengal, raised the issue of the distribution of the IPL's revenues. Dalmiya's control of the BCCI ended in 2005 when his candidate, Ranbir Singh Mahendra, was defeated by Sharad Pawar, with the help of Modi and Shashank Manohar, the current board chief, and he has maintained a relatively low profile since then.

At Sunday's meeting, held at the BCCI office in Mumbai, Dalmiya's is believed to have sought details on the mechanism of how the IPL money was distributed at various levels including the franchises and the staging associations. He was asked to submit a written query, which would be discussed in the near future. "Yes, what you heard is correct," Dalmiya told Cricinfo, when asked if he'd sought a break-up of the IPL monies.

It is also understood that Dalmiya held a separate informal meeting afterwards, with Manohar, N Srinivasan, the board secretary and Arun Jaitley, the president of the Delhi association and a member of the disciplinary committee that will handle the Modi issue. The discussion is believed to have included the controversial IPL broadcasting issue, which involved a facilitation fee of $80 million paid by Multi Screen Media Singapore to World Sports Group Mauritius (who had bought the original global rights when the league was formed). Dalmiya, it can be recalled, was the man who brokered the first big TV deals for the BCCI and organized the two World Cups to be held so far on the subcontinent.