The emirate of Indian cricket and its subjects

Mukul Kesavan in Cricinfo

What sort of cricketing culture sees conflict of interest as normal? The answer lies in the history of cricket administration in India.

Long-time observers of the BCCI know that it used to be cricket's answer to the medieval city state. No Medici controlled Florence as comprehensively as the BCCI controlled cricket in India. The Board of Control was an independent principality, located in India, surrounded by India, but not of India. Its jurisdiction over cricket in India was as absolute as the Vatican's over Catholicism; it brooked no interference in its affairs, not even from the nation state that enclosed it.

Its last pope showed his cardinals that he was the god of most things by turning conductor and orchestrating a symphony of conflicting interests. His orchestra pit was crowded with cricketers, ex-cricketers, captains, captains of industry, consultants, commentators, cooing starlets, all on the same page, bobbing to his baton. During his reign most living things in cricket's jungle became the board's creatures, bound by contract, muted by money and sworn to servility. Not everyone: the Great Indian Bedi, never a herd animal, wouldn't be corralled, but he was an exception. Most errant beasts that held out were forced back into the fold by the threat of excommunication. In the context of the godless present this meant not the eternal absence of the Lord's grace, but the permanent loss of the board's cash.

The board's independence was secured not by defying Leviathan but by co-opting it. Sharad Pawar, Arun Jaitley, Rajeev Shukla, even Narendra Modi, have all helped administer cricket in India. Unluckily for the BCCI, the Supreme Court couldn't be squared, and so this cricketing emirate with Dubai's soul and Abu Dhabi's reserves finds itself in danger of being regulated like a public sector undertaking.

The recent Supreme Court ruling got one thing exactly right: Indian cricket's original sin was the amendment of the virtuous clause in the BCCI's constitution that barred its office holders from taking a financial stake in any matches or tournaments organised by the board. It was this (retrospective) amendment that allowed N Srinivasan, then treasurer of the BCCI, to buy an IPL franchise, Chennai Super Kings. The conflict of interest that this created - especially after Srinivasan rose to become the president of the BCCI - was so enormous, so brazen, so perversely exemplary, that people involved with cricket's economy felt free to wallow in their own, smaller, conflicts.

One of the board's many apologists, appearing on a televised discussion of the Supreme Court's intervention, ingeniously cited the many conflicts of interest that Srinivasan's example had engendered, to normalise his own. If men like MS Dhoni and Rahul Dravid could hold sinecures at India Cements while captaining teams in the IPL, why were people so exercised about Srinivasan's double role?

The short answer to this is that a) Srinivasan's position as Indian cricket's primate and CSK's boss made his conflicts of interest a systemic threat to the health of Indian cricket, and b) Srinivasan's conflicts created an actual, not theoretical, crisis of credibility for Indian cricket. But it's worth taking the apologist's question seriously and supplying a longer answer to understand the cricketing culture that allowed these conflicts of interest to seem normal, even legitimate.

While trying to understand Indian cricket's deafness to the notion of a conflict of interest, it's useful to bear in mind a historical fact: the BCCI transitioned from an oligarchy of patrons to an oligarchy of rentiers and entrepreneurs inside 20 years.

Nominally, the BCCI presides over a pyramidal system of cricket administration based on indirect election. In actual fact most electoral colleges are owned by local grandees. Often a business family will dominate the local cricket association for decades. The elections that legitimise the present system have more in common with the politics of rigged pocket boroughs in 18th-century England than the broad democracy of republican India. Elections to the BCCI, the apex body of Indian cricket, are often accompanied by a chorus of allegations about rigging, gerrymandering and accreditation.

The BCCI is run by a cabal of colonial-style patrons. This self-perpetuating clique struck oil less than 20 years ago. It recognised the potential of revenue streams created by economic liberalisation and successfully connected an opaque club of amateur administrators with real money. The coming of cable television and the consolidation of a national television audience created the revenues that underwrote the first generation of endorsement superstars: Kapil Dev, Azharuddin, Tendulkar. Once, Doordarshan telecast cricket as a kind of republican duty to India's cricket-mad citizens; then private television channels learnt it was a privilege for which they had to pay vast sums.

The game was so comprehensively monetised that the BCCI began demanding fees to permit the photographing of matches and the broadcasting of radio commentary. The idea that cricket was news or even that it was an event in the real world that could be reported on, gratis, gave way to the idea that cricket was proprietary entertainment that could only be captured in pictures or the spoken word for a fee. ESPNcricinfo briefly stopped calling IPL teams by their franchise names because it was advised that these names were commercial properties that couldn't be used without payment.





With us or against us: the BCCI had the last laugh when Kapil Dev chose to side with the rebel ICL © AFP

The monetising of cricket occurred within an administrative culture where the BCCI's officials still saw themselves as "honorary" patrons. Before the boom these men had leveraged their status as cricket's patrons into social standing as city grandees. For ex-rajas and aspirational businessmen - traditionally, big business didn't bother with cricket - cricket was a way of being someone on the regional or national stage.

N Srinivasan's back story fits the model. He ran India Cements, he was genuinely interested in sport and he was a pillar of Madras society. For him, as for the Rungtas in Rajasthan or Dalmiya in Bengal, cricket was a route to social consequence and the public eye. In Madras, Srinivasan was preceded as patron by two other industrialists, AC Muthiah and his father MA Chidambaram, after whom the stadium at Chepauk is named. It's important to recognise that men like Chidambaram, Muthiah and Srinivasan didn't make money out of the game before the boom. They actually spent their own money subsidising cricketers and cricket because this was what patrons did.

In this way the men who governed Indian cricket came to see themselves as benefactors and the men who played cricket in India learnt to recognise them as such. Through the long shamateur epoch of Indian cricket, cricketers were supported by sinecures in private companies and public sector undertakings, and socialised into the role of dependent clients. It was a recognition forced upon them by the need to make a living in a sport that had no business model and generated no money.

These patron-client relationships survived the monetisation of Indian cricket, which happened, it's worth remembering, with bewildering speed. Even after successful cricketers became rich men, members of a sporting super elite, they went along with being infantilised as clients. There were three broad reasons for this.

One, gratitude. They remembered the hard times and were grateful for the support that patrons like Srinivasan had extended to the sport. India Cements had dozens of players on its rolls. It supported league cricket in Madras and helped players - not necessarily international players - make a living. (It wasn't alone in this. Sungrace Mafatlal supported cricket generously in Bombay; Sachin Tendulkar joined its Times Shield team in 1990 after his Test debut. It is something of an irony that this fabric brand didn't survive the economic liberalisation that helped make both Tendulkar and the BCCI fabulously wealthy.)

Two, pragmatism. Players recognised that while the financial basis of the sport and their own financial standing might have been transformed by sponsorship, endorsements and television revenue, the men who ran this new money-spinning machine were the same patrons who had run the shamateur, shabby-genteel set-up in the earlier era. It made complete sense to say yes if a patron like Srinivasan wanted you on his rolls even if the money from the sinecure made no real difference to your net worth.

Three, fear. To annoy the BCCI was to be exiled from Indian cricket and its economy; it was much safer to acknowledge the power of these "honorary" patrons than to be your own man. Here the ruthless purge of the Indian Cricket League rebels was the cautionary tale. A board that could unperson Kapil Dev, arguably the greatest Indian cricketer of the television age, for daring to dabble in an unauthorised league, was not to be crossed.

Thus, administrators like Srinivasan, persuaded of their virtue because of their generosity as patrons, were consumed by a sense of entitlement that made the very suggestion of a conflict of interest an impertinence. And players, used to deferring to patrons who made their livelihoods possible, found it hard to break the habit of clientage even when they didn't need the money. The idea that a sinecure might constitute a conflict of interest must have seemed preposterous: how could something endorsed by Srinivasan, uber-patron and undisputed master of the cricketing universe, be wrong?

Now that the Supreme Court has ruled that he was wrong, that there is such a thing as a conflict of interest and that the amendment of rule 6.2.4 was illegal, Indian cricket's supple auxiliaries have started airing their doubts about Srinivasan. The ex-player, the ex-IPL franchise manager, the marketing consultant, the sports management agent, the plausible commentator, have begun shyly sharing their long-brewed conviction that something was amiss. Shyly, because it isn't yet clear that the sheikh is dead, and given Srinivasan's past resilience who can blame them?

Will Indian cricket be regulated into virtue by the Supreme Court? It's hard to tell. But we do know that a precedent has been laid down by the court: the judiciary has stepped in and taken charge of the affairs of the BCCI. It has dismissed the BCCI's claim of being a private body. It has amended the BCCI's constitution, instructed Srinivasan to either sell CSK or withdraw from board elections, and assigned the reform of the board to a committee of three retired judges. It'll be a nice irony if the crony capitalism of this cabal becomes the proximate cause of a creeping nationalisation of Indian cricket.

BCCI monopoly and judicial review

Suhrith Parthasarathy in The Hindu

By controlling competitive cricket in India, with minimal regulation, the Board of Control for Cricket in India has enabled itself to encroach upon constitutionally guaranteed civil liberties

The Supreme Court of India, in holding that the Board of Control for Cricket (BCCI) in India is bound by the rigours of public law, in a landmark judgment on January 22, may well have helped steer cricket administration in the country into a new age of greater accountability. In recent years, the BCCI has suffered an enormous loss of credibility. Its management has been riddled with several cases of egregious conflicts of interest. And the Indian Premier League, organised under the Board’s aegis, has become renowned for its wanton excesses. As a result, any trust that was reposed in the Board by the public has over the last decade been completely obliterated. Viewed intuitively, the Supreme Court’s intervention certainly seemed necessary to restore “institutional integrity” to the management of cricket. Counter-arguments, however, abound. In spite of the BCCI’s quite palpable maladministration, many appear to see the court’s verdict, which seeks to imbue in the Board a more onerous public responsibility, as an improper exercise of powers of judicial review. Although these arguments can appear pedantic, they also carry particular jurisprudential weight. Critics say, as the BCCI argued for itself, the Board is merely an exclusive society governed purely by a set of by-laws, which are in the nature of a private contract between an elite set of members. According to the BCCI, it owes an obligation only to those members that subscribe to its by-laws; and even these obligations are restricted by the nature of the responsibility imposed therein.

Outside statutory control

In the case of other private societies, such a contention would typically be valid, as most such entities generally derive their authority solely from contract. But concentrating only on the source of a body’s power can lead to gross distortions. This is especially so in the case of the BCCI, which operates in a nebulous space outside statutory and constitutional control, but nonetheless wields enormous monopolistic power. In completely controlling competitive cricket in India, with nearly no regulation whatsoever, the Board has appropriated unto itself a unique ability to make substantial encroachments into civil liberties guaranteed by the Constitution. It can certainly affect, for instance, free of all checks and balances, the rights of Indian citizens to participate in games of cricket, with a view to ultimately securing employment as a cricketer.

Public bodies in India are generally held accountable through a process known as judicial review. Originally, under English Common Law, principles of which have been substantially adopted by Indian laws, the Crown possessed a discretionary power to issue “prerogative writs.” These were extraordinary orders directing the behaviour of different wings of the government, including inferior courts and public authorities. Through this power, which was subsequently transferred to the judiciary, the courts sought to impose a high standard of transparency, reasonableness and proportionality in action on public authorities.

In India, the Supreme Court and the different State high courts have been vested with a similar power to issue writs through Articles 32 and 226 of the Constitution. Article 32 grants a person the liberty to approach the Supreme Court directly when his or her fundamental right has been violated. Ordinarily, this relief is available only against the “State” (defined in Article 12 to include “the government and Parliament of India, the government and the legislature of each of the States, and all local and other authorities within the territory of India or under the control of the Government of India.”) Article 226 affords a wider relief. It allows a person to approach a high court seeking a writ against any person or authority for any purpose.

Each of these articles has been the subject of substantial debate by the Supreme Court. In the case of Article 12, the court has held that it is only those bodies that are created by a statute, which enjoy their own lawmaking powers, and are pervasively dominated — financially, functionally, and administratively — by the government that can be described as a “State.” Practically, what this has meant is that private bodies, even if they were capable of invading fundamental rights, through acutely entrenched processes of discrimination, would not be held accountable for such violations. Even Article 226, which grants the high courts the authority to issue writs, has been circumscribed to include within its jurisdiction only those authorities that perform overwhelmingly public functions. But even these bodies would not be bound by many of the fundamental rights— such as the right to equality — but would be governed only by other constitutional and statutory rights specifically guaranteed against them, and the more general common law principles of reasonableness and fairness in administrative action.

Inroads into fundamental rights

The question of whether the BCCI is “State” for the purposes of Article 12 was already conclusively determined in 2005 by the Supreme Court in a case initiated by Zee Telefilms Ltd. Here, a five-judge bench found that the BCCI was not an instrumentality of the State, and was therefore not subject to most of the fundamental rights guaranteed by the Constitution. This also meant that petitioners aggrieved by a decision of the Board could usually not approach the Supreme Court directly for relief. What the ruling ignored however is the fact that some private authorities, such as the BCCI, which exercise public functions independent of governmental regulation, could use their monopolistic position to make critical inroads into fundamental rights, particularly by curbing access to livelihood or to a public resource that citizens are ordinarily entitled to use. The danger in such an approach was, in fact, recognised as far back as in 1787 by Lord Chief Justice Hale in his treatise, De Portibus Malis, where he wrote that when private property is “affected with a public interest, it ceases to be juris privationly.”

Therefore, in the recent litigation initiated by the Cricket Association of Bihar, the Supreme Court, although bound by its earlier decision in Zee Telefilms, is correct in holding that the BCCI is amenable to judicial review under Article 226. It now becomes incumbent upon the Board to act with a sense of fairness and equity, and to ensure that it does not abuse its dominant position.

Some fear that this decision of the Supreme Court would open up the floodgates, bringing a number of societies and other such private associations within the courts’ powers of judicial review. But, as the English barrister Michael Beloff once wrote, “It is an argument, which intellectually has little to commend it… For it is often the case that once the courts have shown the willingness to intervene, the standards of the bodies at risk of their intervention tend to improve.”

Common law has historically imposed a duty on those exercising powers of monopoly — whether self-arrogated or through governmental intervention — to act fairly and reasonably. Our courts must now extend this rationale to hold not only the BCCI accountable, but also other such private associations, which in exercise of monopolistic powers, impinge upon the citizenry’s most basic civil liberties.

BCCI - Time for an overhaul

Sambit Bal in Cricinfo

To grasp the true significance of the seminal verdict handed down by India's Supreme Court in the IPL spot-fixing case, we need to look beyond the immediate. Beyond N Srinivasan, who has grabbed the headlines; beyond the improprieties, both alleged and proven, that were under scrutiny; and beyond the turf wars within and surrounding the BCCI, which resulted in this case being filed.

The central message delivered by the court is a simple but powerful one: sport, cricket in this case, is sustained by the faith of the fans, and administrators are only custodians of that faith. It's a principle the BCCI has observed mostly in the breach, and the highest court of the land has started a process of redressal.

Over the last few years the BCCI has been presented, through a series of controversies and scandals, several opportunities for course correction and institutional reform but each of these has been spurned due to a combination of hubris and self-interest. The Supreme Court has now decided that the BCCI is neither capable of cleaning up its own act, nor can it be trusted with the job.

The cloud over Srinivasan's re-election as BCCI president has dominated the immediate news agenda but the most consequential part of the judgement is that the board has now been brought within the ambit of judicial scrutiny that public and state bodies are subjected to. Simply put, the BCCI can no longer be a law unto itself under the guise of being a private organisation.

The tenor of the judgement is unequivocal and unambiguous: with governance must come accountability and propriety, and responsibility doesn't end with protecting the bottom line; the fiduciary obligation of a sports organisation extends beyond the bottom line to protecting the integrity and credibility of the game.

For these alone, it is a profoundly groundbreaking judgement. To quote:

"[The] BCCI's commercial plans for its own benefit and the benefit of the players are bound to blow up in smoke if the people who watch and support the game were to lose interest or be indifferent because they get to know that some business interests have hijacked the game for their own ends or that the game is no longer the game they know or love because of frauds on and off the field. There is no manner of doubt whatsoever that the game enjoys its popularity and raises passions only because of what it stands for and because the people who watch the sport believe that it is being played in the true spirit of the game without letting any corrupting influence come anywhere near the principles and fundamental imperatives considered sacrosanct and inviolable."

The immediate fallout of the judgement will be felt most severely by Srinivasan, who has remained cricket's most powerful figure despite being off the BCCI throne. He has been given the clear option of choosing between the BCCI presidency, a position he dearly covets, and ownership of Chennai Super Kings, the highly successful IPL franchise that he has assiduously nurtured.

It's a decision he ought to have taken months ago when it became demonstrably apparent - in case it hadn't been at the time of his acquiring the franchise - that his two hats were irredeemably incompatible. It wasn't so much a matter of his complicity in the wrongdoings of his son-in-law as it was the mere perception of him being in a position of influence when matters relating to his own franchise came up for adjudication.

In striking down the controversial amendment to the BCCI's constitution that allowed Srinivasan to buy CSK, the court said it violated "a fundamental tenet of law that no one can be a judge in his own cause''.

But while Srinivasan's adversaries in the BCCI publicly rejoiced in his discomfiture once the judgement was delivered, few of them can escape culpability. The truth is that the judgement is an indictment of the system. That includes those - Sharad Pawar, Shashank Manohar, IS Bindra and Lalit Modi included - who were party to the constitutional amendment that institutionalised conflict of interest, and then there has been the majority, who have been complicit through their acquiescence. It bears noting that Srinivasan was re-elected unopposed and unanimously even while this case was being heard.

And it can also be argued that while Srinivasan sought and obtained the organisation's sanction for acquiring a commercial interest in the IPL, it is not the first or only instance of a conflict of interest in the BCCI. The father-in-law of Pawar's daughter had a stake in Multi Screen Media, which owned broadcast rights to the IPL; and an affidavit filed by Srinivasan in April 2014, during the hearing of this case, pointed out that Bindra's son had been an employee of Nimbus, the company that owned BCCI television rights between 2006 and 2014, while the company negotiated, and obtained, a discount of nearly US$50 million from a BCCI committee on which Bindra was a member.

The judgement is, however, the beginning of a process that will be now be taken forward by the three-member committee entrusted with the critical task of deciding the punishment for Gurunath Meiyappan - who, it has now been established, was a Super Kings official for all purposes, and who was found to have been betting for and against his own team, and chillingly, in one instance, bet on his team scoring within a range that was one run off the eventual total - and Raj Kundra, a shareholder in Rajasthan Royals. The committee is also tasked with examining the allegations against the conduct of Sundar Raman, the chief operating officer of the IPL, and with overseeing the forthcoming BCCI elections.

But potentially the most far-reaching part of its job will be to examine and recommend institutional reforms for the BCCI. Prima facie, the mandate seems all-encompassing: it covers the role and eligibility of administrators, regulations to resolve issues of conflict of interest, amendments that might be necessary to carry out the recommendations of the Mudgal Committee, and this open-ended mandate:

"Any other recommendation with or without suitable amendment of the relevant Rules and Regulations, which the Committee may consider necessary to make with a view to preventing sporting frauds, conflict of interests, streamlining the working of BCCI to make it more responsive to the expectations of the public at large and to bring transparency in practices and procedures followed by BCCI."

Shortly after the judgement was delivered, the BCCI released a statement welcoming the end of the uncertainty and offering its "unstinted co-operation" to the committee. It must now match its words in both deed and spirit. A combination of circumstances and entrepreneurship have handed it the leadership of world cricket through financial might. But real leadership can only be earned through credibility.

For the BCCI, all the battles outside have been won; the world has been conquered; past slights, real and perceived, have been avenged. It's time to look within.

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INTERESTS IN CONFLICT - The Supreme Court and Mr Srinivasan

 

Mukul Kesavan in The Telegraph

Earlier this week, the Supreme Court told lawyers representing the Board of Control for Cricket in India that if the Board’s president, N. Srinivasan, didn’t step down from his post voluntarily, the court would pass orders compelling him to step down. The court went further; it declared that it was “nauseating” that Srinivasan was still in office. It didn’t stop there; referring to the earlier inquiry commissioned by the BCCI into the scandal (conducted by two retired judges of the Madras High Court), the court asked rhetorically, “Can we say that the probe report was managed and if we say so, then what will be the consequences?” The uncompromising ‘go, or else’ tone, the unusually strong language and the startling suggestion of impropriety seemed to spring from the bench’s exasperation with Srinivasan’s refusal to step aside as president for the duration of the investigation. The judges believed that the investigation into the fixing and betting scandal involving Srinivasan’s IPL club franchise, the Chennai Super Kings and his son-in-law, Gurunath Meiyappan, couldn’t be fairly conducted while he remained in office. The story of the CSK scandal has been the chronicle of a fall foretold. If the Supreme Court had intervened decisively a few years ago, there mightn’t have been a scandal at all. The large reason why matters came to this pass is this: Indians have the greatest difficulty in agreeing upon what constitutes a conflict of interest. The squalid sequence of events that culminated in the CSK scandal was set in motion, ironically, when the BCCI decided to amend an excellent provision in its constitution expressly intended to insulate Board officials from conflicts of interest. The clause laid down that “No administrator shall have, directly or indirectly, any commercial interest in the matches and events conducted by the Board”. The amended version specifically excluded the IPL, the Champion’s League and Twenty20 cricket. This amendment was passed retrospectively, eight months after the inaugural bidding for the IPL franchises, to regularize N. Srinivasan’s ownership of the CSK franchise. When A.C. Muthiah, a former president of the BCCI moved the Supreme Court arguing that an administrator of the cricket board shouldn’t be allowed to own an IPL franchise because of the obvious conflict of interest, a two-judge bench of the Supreme Court delivered a split verdict. This meant that till the matter was resolved by a larger bench of the court, Srinivasan was free to simultaneously own CSK and function as president of the BCCI. Justice J.M. Panchal was one of the judges on the two-judge bench that delivered the split verdict. His reasons for rejecting Muthiah’s petition are instructive. He ruled that no conflict of interest existed because a) no member of the BCCI or franchisee had objected to the amendment, b) the rules were framed long before the IPL was conceived of and therefore didn’t apply and c) the BCCI had suffered no financial loss because of the “so-called conflict of interest”. To judge the force of Justice Panchal’s arguments, we need a working definition of “conflict of interest”. The standard definition cited by Wikipedia goes like this: “A conflict of interest is a set of circumstances that creates a risk that professional judgement or actions regarding a primary interest will be unduly influenced by a secondary interest.” By the terms of this definition it seems plain that Srinivasan’s position as the treasurer of the BCCI at the time when franchises were allotted created a clear conflict of interest because as a BCCI official, he would be involved in administering a tournament in which he owned a franchise. The fact that the IPL didn’t exist when the BCCI’s conflict of interest rules were framed should have had no bearing on their applicability to the tournament.  The whole point of having written rules is to lay down principles that allow an organization negotiate novel circumstances in an ethical way. You could even argue that the framers of the rule that Srinivasan had amended were prescient because they anticipated an IPL-like circumstance and sought to forestall it. The absence of objections from other franchisees or members of the BCCI should have made no difference to the application of the principle. A circumstance that creates a conflict of interest exists independently of the opinions or responses of people who might be affected by it. A bunch of franchisees keen to feed at the IPL trough weren’t likely to antagonize a powerful BCCI official determined to own a franchise. Good rules — like the conflict of interest clause — help organizations achieve ethical outcomes without the need for individual heroism. Justice Panchal’s third reason for dismissing Muthiah’s petition was that Srinivasan’s dual role hadn’t caused the board any financial loss. This conviction that a conflict of interest objection is valid only if that conflict of interest has caused actual material harm is widespread. It is also, I think, misplaced. As the Wikipedia entry on the subject goes on to say, “[t]he presence of a conflict of interest is independent of the occurrence of impropriety. Therefore, a conflict of interest can be discovered and voluntarily defused before any corruption occurs” (emphasis added). The reason the Supreme Court should have upheld Muthiah’s objection is not because Srinivasan’s double role as administrator and franchisee had caused the BCCI any harm at the time but precisely to ensure that it didn’t harm the BCCI in the future. The risk of wrongdoing, the fact that conflicting interests can potentially corrupt motivation should have been reason enough to force Srinivasan to choose between being a franchisee or a board official. The split verdict saw the case referred to a larger bench and in the interim Srinivasan rose to become president of the board. The rest is history. The tendency to dismiss conflict of interest charges while indignantly waving the standard of personal integrity, is epidemic in Indian cricket. Thus K. Srikkanth saw no difficulty in simultaneously being the chief of the national team and the brand ambassador of the Chennai Super Kings; Kumble was comfortable with being the chairman of the National Cricket Academy, the president of the KSCA and the director of a player management company and Dhoni, India’s captain in all three formats of the game was briefly a shareholder in a player management firm called Rhiti that counted R.P. Singh and Suresh Raina amongst its clients. These are intelligent, successful men who seem to view the conflict of interest caution as an allegation of corruption, when it is, in fact, a principle intended to safeguard their reputation and integrity. This isn’t surprising: people take their cues from the men at the top and BCCI’s president isn’t just the supremo of Indian cricket and the owner of Chennai Super Kings, he is about to become the chairman of the International Cricket Council. If Srinivasan’s colossal conflict of interest could be retrospectively legitimized and glossed over by the BCCI without swift corrective action by the courts, why should anyone involved in Indian cricket declare a pecuniary interest for the sake of transparency or recuse himself from situations that create a conflict of interest? Now that the Supreme Court, spurred on by the Justice Mudgal report, has brusquely declared that Srinivasan’s presidency can’t be reconciled with a fair investigation of the CSK scandal, the scandal begins to seem like a cautionary tale. Instead of talking about the potential for wrong-doing created by Srinivasan’s conflict of interest and trying to forestall it, the courts and the police are now dealing with allegations of actual wrong-doing. The amendment that gelded the conflict-of-interest clause by exempting the IPL was the original sin: it led directly to Srinivasan’s fall and it’s responsible for the collateral damage to cricket’s credibility. Will the example of the apex court encourage Indian cricket’s many publicists to press for a reinstatement of the original clause? Will it help them speak truth to power? I wouldn’t hold my breath: Lalit Modi’s downfall didn’t reform the BCCI: its publicists and clients switched their loyalties to Srinivasan without missing a beat. Conflicts of interest can be fixed; servility is a permanent condition.

Sreesanth ban 'against principles of natural justice'

Nagraj Gollapudi in Cricinfo

Sreesanth's legal counsel has called the life ban imposed by the BCCI "bizarre", against the principles of natural justice and unlikely to stand legal scrutiny, and said the player would challenge the ban in court once he received a copy of the order. A day after Sreesanth was handed the ban by the BCCI's disciplinary committee, his counsel Rebecca John said the biggest flaw was the report drew heavily on the police findings in the criminal case, which itself is yet to reach a verdict.

The sanctions were based on the report compiled by the board's anti-corruption commissioner Ravi Sawani.

"The [BCCI] order is completely against the principles of natural justice," John told ESPNcricinfo. If Sawani had relied so heavily on the findings of Delhi Police, she said, then the least he and the BCCI should have done was wait for the final verdict by the Patiala House Court in Delhi, which is hearing the case.

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Also read

Sreesanth - Another modern day Valmiki?

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"It has based its findings on personal interactions with members of Delhi Police as well as taken material from the chargesheet that has been filed by the police before a sessions court. If that is so then they should have waited for the court to determine whether or not any of this holds up in legal proceedings. They just picked up conversations they had with members of Delhi Police where they said Sreesanth and other members of the cricketing community confessed before them. It is a very, very loose report with little or no substance in it," John, who was hired by Sreesanth as soon as Delhi Police arrested him on corruption charges during the IPL in May, said.

She pointed out that the evidence produced by Delhi Police against all the Rajasthan Royal players was found to be insufficient to keep them in custody - the sessions court has granted bail to all of them, including Sreesanth. "The fact is that the sessions court has released players on bail and said none of this adds up as a case. [The court said] it is very, very tenuous - the link between whatever bookie you are saying had a role to play and the players, particularly Sreesanth, and granted him bail. And then this BCCI's one-man committee says that Sreesanth is guilty of spot-fixing and hands over a life sentence to him. Not only is it is excessive, it is completely contrary to all principles of natural justice."

John said that from what she had read of his report on the internet, Sawani's findings, especially on Sreesanth, never added up to a case. "How does he come to a conclusion? By having personal conversations with police officials. And you are basing your findings on these?"

In his report Sawani had noted that he listened to and read the transcripts of audio tapes in possession of Delhi Police of conversations between Sreesanth and the alleged bookie. "If you want to read these audio tapes, which are part of the Delhi Police [evidence] in a criminal trial, the link is so tenuous. You will believe it only because the Special Cell of Delhi Police is saying you will have to believe it in a particular way. In any case these are allegations which have to be assessed, processed and a finding has to be determined by a court of law," John said.

According to John Sreesanth is on bail only because "prima facie" Delhi Police had not managed to press a foolproof case against him. "The only reason the life ban was imposed - Mr Srinivasan was very keen to tell the public and the people of India he was treating [the issue] with a heavy hand and some people had to be made scapegoats," John said.

"What is more annoying form the point of the view of the players is that they have let the big fish get away. What happens to Mr Srinivasan. He is owner of Chennai Super Kings and there is a case of conflict of interest pending in the Supreme Court against him. The Bombay High Court recently had called the two-member committee illegal after it cleared Gurunath Meiyappan and Raj Kundra [part of Chennai Super Kings and Rajasthan Royals] from corruption charges.

"Now when the BCCI, of which Srinivasan is the de facto or de jure head, conducts itself in this kind of fashion and then it hands over these sentences to players, who are soft targets, it is a little bizarre," John said.

A Possible solution to the DRS Imbroglio

by Girish Menon

The DRS debate, definitely on the netosphere and to some extent on TV and print media, appears to be a conversation of the deaf. These warriors appear to have wrapped themselves in national colours with scorn and ridicule being the weapons used. Does this win over their opponents? I doubt it, because both groups are dominated by users of terms like 'Luddites' and '100 % foolproof' which instead of persuading the dissenter actually antagonises them. In this piece I will attempt to try to mediate this debate and attempt a possible solution to the imbroglio.

It is a principle of rhetoric that the side demanding a change from the status quo must provide the burden of proof. To that extent I will agree that the pro DRS lobby have already proven that DRS does reduce the number of umpiring errors in a cricket match. I'm sure that BCCI will admit this point. However the ICC's claim that DRS improves decisions by 93 % is in the realm of statistics and it is possible to find methodological grey areas that will challenge this number. So for purposes of this argument I'm willing to discount ICC's claim and willing to start on the premise that DRS does reduce errors by at least 70 %. The debate should actually be more concerned with the next question i.e. 'at what price does one obtain this 70% increase in decision accuracy and is it worthwhile?' This question is ignored by net warriors and media pundits alike and I wonder why?

Before I proceed further I wish to remind readers of the MMR scare scandal, not many years ago, that prompted a mass scare in the UK about a triple jab vaccine and its links with autism. Some may recall Andrew Wakefield, an expert, on TV exhorting viewers to avoid the vaccine. The saga ended with Wakefield being discredited and found to have multiple undeclared conflicts of interest in propagating the scare.

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To avoid a similar hijacking of the DRS debate I suggest that all protagonists declare their interests in the matter. I for one have no truck with any cricketing body or media organisation or a technology provider or a provider of a competing technology. Also, I'd like a reduction in umpiring errors at a price that will sustain and grow cricket all over the world.

Similarly it is incumbent on the likes of Michael Vaughan to declare their links with the purveyors of such technologies so that the cricket loving public know that their views are without any profit or personal motive.

While the reliability and validity of DRS technologies has been well debated, the monopoly profits that derive to these suppliers has been largely ignored. I suspect this is the real issue where the BCCI is at loggerheads with the others. As an outsider, I think national cricket boards have their own technology suppliers which they wish to back. They may even have an investment in them which may expose their reluctance to adopt alternative and cheaper solutions to a problem. Jagmohan Dalmiya's argument against the esoteric Duckworth-Lewis method is a case in point.

It is a truism that in the market for technologies, unfortunately, the best technology does not always win.  Economics students will be aware that Dvorak keyboards have never made much headway against their QWERTY rivals and  Betamax became a cropper to VHS. So just like the well ensconced Duckworth Lewis method, Hot Spot  and Hawk Eye hope to become monopoly providers of technology services to the ICC. This will enable them protection from cheaper alternative service providers and will guarantee their promoters life long rents.

There is another dimension to this issue viz. 'Cost'. In 1976 the FIH (International Federation for Hockey) replaced natural turf with astroturf to improve the game. Today, while the game looks good on TV and is fast etc it provides no competition to cricket in countries playing both sports. One possible cause is the decline of the sport in India and Pakistan, the two nations who did not have the financial resources to create adequate 'astroturf based' infrastructure among the lovers of the sport. Along similar lines, the prohibitively expensive DRS technology may bankrupt the smaller cricket boards of the world. I'm sure no warrior on either side of this debate wants a reduction in the numerical diversity of cricket lovers.

I suppose as a way out of this imbroglio would be for the ICC to take ownership of the current technologies and make the technology 'open source'. Allow competitive bidding for DRS services instead of paying monopoly rents to the patent owning suppliers. I'm sure this will reduce the costs for DRS and even the BCCI will be keen to support such a venture.  

Indian Cricket - Conflict of Interest Stories?

Gaurav Gupta, TNN | Jun 4, 2013, 01.21 AM IST

It has been an open secret for ever. India captain Mahendra Singh Dhoni maintained a strategic distance but his association with Arun Pandey, the face if not brain behind Rhiti Sports, was well known in top cricket circles.

In 2010, he turned it into a business partnership by signing up with Pandey to market him for a whopping Rs 210 crore-deal over three years. It now transpires that the relationship went much deeper: Dhoni owns a 15 per cent stake in the firm, even if it was only for a brief while, as they are so feebly claiming.

Not surprisingly, Indian cricket has responded angrily, with players and officials crying foul. The company, incidentally, also manages Suresh Raina, Ravindra Jadeja, Pragyan Ojha and RP Singh (who denied being part of Rhiti at the moment), four players who have been almost regular fixtures in all three formats of the game for Team India.

More than that, the preferential treatment that Raina and Jadeja have enjoyed under his dispensation at Chennai Super Kings has always seemed strange. Jadeja, in fact, was acquired for an incredible annual fee of $2 million. One can imagine the killing Rhiti made when the deal was stuck.

TOI spoke to a cross-section of players and BCCI officials and almost all of them conceded that the skipper of the Indian team holding shares in an agency that manages players in his team itself was not an ideal situation. "It should not be allowed because the captain does influence the selection of as team; in fact, overseas, he and the coach have the sole authority on team selection. Now, I can only think of all the instances that looked like 'wrong' selections in recent times," former Board secretary Jayawant Lele said.

"It is better that the BCCI deals with the issue quickly before it gets any bigger," said former India off-spinner Erapalli Prasanna.

Dhoni has shown a preference for certain players in the team, and this revelation has only added fuel to the fire, with many connecting the dots. According to his critics, many talented players have been dumped during his reign without a fair opportunity. Dig deeper into first class cricket and you can cull out those names: batsmen Manoj Tiwary, Saurabh Tiwary, all-rounder Abhishek Nayar, seamer Dhawal Kulkarni, leg-spinner Amit Mishra, wicketkeeper Parthiv Patel, to start with.

"With him, it's a question of like and dislike. If you are disliked by him, good luck to you! You can keep performing in domestic cricket, it doesn't matter" said a player.

Dhoni and N Srinivasan aren't alone in the 'sea of conflict of interest in Indian cricket' though. A Board member pointed out: "Anil Kumble heads the Karnataka State Cricket Association (KSCA) and runs a player management agency (Tenvic). When Dilip Vengsarkar & Co selected Virat Kohli ahead of S Badrinath in the Indian team, Srinivasan was miffed, and got the then Board president, Sharad Pawar, to remove that selection committee on the pretext that those who were office-bearers in the state associations could not be selectors at the same time. Now, the same Board has allowed Roger Binny, who is the vice-president of KSCA, to be a selector. Ratnakar Shetty, till last year, was a vice-president with the Mumbai Cricket association (MCA), while being the CAO of the Board. I can cite ten instances in Indian cricket where there is a conflict of interest. All this works according to people's convenience," he says.

A few voices, though, defended Dhoni's association. "I don't see any conflict of interest here. Unless it is proved that he has been influencing the players to join the company or is pushing the said players' inclusion in the Indian team, it is not proper to make such allegations. He may have a stake in the company but that doesn't mean he is guilty of foul-play. Can't a player invest his money in a business?" questions former India left-arm spinner Venkatapathi Raju. "Dhoni can have stakes in a company and that should not be looked in a different way. Dhoni is a captain and knows what to do. We are unnecessarily making an issue out of it," says Rajasthan batsman Robin Bisht.

Standard & Poor's feels Justice's lash, but can the law ever conquer greed?

The DOJ is making headlines with high-profile suits against Wall Street firms, but singling out a few won't fix systemic wrongdoing

• 
• • Heidi Moore
  • guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 5 February 2013 21.16 GMT

Standard & Poor's faces a Department of Justice lawsuit alleging the firm succumbed to conflicts of interest in their ratings for banks of mortgage-backed securities. Photograph: Stan Honda/AFP/Getty Images

 

In politics, public humiliation can often be a useful motivator. Take the Department of Justice, which was hauled over the coals in a recent PBS Frontline documentary on its lack of vigor in Wall Street prosecutions. The DOJ has been on a rampage lately.

The DOJ has been reportedly planning to file charges against the Royal Bank of Scotland, and last night, it filed an actual lawsuit against Standard & Poor's for misrating mortgage bonds before the financial crisis.

The Department of Justice is also getting creative and taking a novel tack. Standard & Poor's and other ratings firms have long maintained that their ratings, which were opinions, were protected under freedom of speech; in essence, you can't kill the messenger. This has proven a bulletproof defense for years.

The DOJ, in its lawsuit, counters that S&P acted as a double agent by allegedly violating its own standards. Ratings firms are paid by banks to rate products created by banks – an obvious conflict of interest in many cases. Standard & Poor's, like other firms, promised objectivity.

Thus the DOJ has alleged that S&P, while purporting to provide objectivity, was working on behalf of banks that needed good ratings for bad mortgage securities. To support this allegation, the DOJ quotes several emails that show S&P fretting over losing business to Moody's.

DOJ v Wall Street: from zero to hero

This rampage is great … directionally. The DOJ generally has to go crawling to Wall Street, tentatively striking deals that won't hurt financial reputations too badly and the bottom line hardly at all.

So, who doesn't love a major character finally overcoming its low self-esteem and owning its power?
In movie terms, this is the equivalent of the nerdy librarian who doffs her glasses and shakes out her hair, at which someone must yell, "Why, Miss Jones, you are magnificent!" It is Beyonce, pointedly filing her nails in the video for "Irreplaceable", squaring her shoulders and declaring, "You must not know about me. You got me twisted." It is Patrick Dempsey growing from spindly tween idol into a silvery heartthrob.


Considering that the DOJ is trying to regain its swagger, it seems churlish to object that it still may not be thinking big enough. And yet …

The DOJ's approach is great, in theory. It's good for a prosecutor's reputation to rake one firm over the coals and humiliate it publicly. But the truth is, the effect is limited. Other firms, rather than looking at the embarrassed firm and thinking, chastened, "there but for the grace of God go I," instead think, "God, glad I'm not like that poor sucker who got caught for doing what everyone does."
The DOJ is the greatest prosecutorial force in the country. It has subpoena power – excellent for commandeering embarrassing financial documents – and just enough resources and publicity power to really strike fear into Wall Street wrongdoers. The SEC is too underfunded; the CFTC has a shorter reach. The DOJ is, in short, the only entity in the country with any hope of accomplishing anything in the way of white-collar law enforcement.

Why 'making an example' doesn't work


There is some method to striking fear into the hearts of villains. For one thing, villains always believe they are exceptional. This is the case on Wall Street as well. Anyone who does anything dodgy involving money is usually pretty self-aware. He never deludes himself into thinking, "Oh, I am not doing anything wrong." He thinks, instead, "The authorities will never be smart enough to catch me."
This is why singling out RBS, or UBS, or S&P, will never have the fearsome deterrent effect that the DOJ really wants. In fact, by going after the firms piecemeal, the DOJ may actually be encouraging future wrongdoers rather than turning them away from crime.

You see, the DOJ is going after one or two firms for actions that were widespread across the industry. Fixing interest rates was the work of thousands of people. It's safe to say that S&P was not the only ratings firm that fretted that it would lose fees if it started downgrading bonds. In fact, S&P, according to the emails provided by the DOJ, frequently worried that it was not keeping up with Moody's.

This is a familiar pattern in Wall Street cases: Merrill Lynch, for instance, packaged all those bad mortgage securities partly because it was trying to outdo the profits of Goldman Sachs.

Wall Street's culture of rule-breaking

The dirty secret of Wall Street is that it delights in evading rules – not just for profit, but also for sport. To keep its skills sharp. The finance industry is full of clever people who love nothing more than finding loopholes to subvert authority, whether of government or of their own head of trading. The reason Wall Street leaders are always yelling about the necessity of teamwork is because acting mostly in one's individual self-interest – and the interest of one's bonus payment – is almost always the rule.

So, yes, this sudden burst of enthusiasm from the DOJ is a great development. There's no question that it's good, for most of the populace, to see one of America's great prosecutorial forces finally pull its act together on one of the defining scandals of our age: the greed – and sometimes fraud – that turned the housing crash into a financial crisis.

Yes, it's late – in fact, it pushes the traditional statute of limitations on such cases – but at least, some of the gears are finally moving. "Wisdom too often never comes, and so one ought not to reject it merely because it comes late," the supreme court Justice Felix Frankfurter once said, and he could have been talking about all these delayed actions.

It's also always fun to participate in the ritual of reading the hilariously self-incriminating internal emails that the DOJ captured. One of the best includes an S&P analyst sarcastically commenting that, after the crisis, the firm looked like something out of the 1980s hapless Wall Street comedy Trading Places:

"You should see how it is here. It's like a friggin trading floor. 'Downgrade, Mortimer, downgrade!'"

Bond ratings now less relevant

Wall Street, of course, didn't need to see these emails to see which way the wind was blowing with the ratings firms. Most banks and trading floors stopped depending on official bond ratings ages ago, even though all the ratings firms retain excellent records on corporate and municipal bonds (in fact, anything that is not mortgage-related).

BlackRock, one of the favorite bond managers of the federal government, has boasted for years that it does its own analysis on potential defaults rather than rely on ratings firms. (BlackRock's founder, Larry Fink, was not coincidentally one of the creators of the mortgage-backed security.) Official ratings are often only a technical requirement, but rarely do many banks or investors rely on them any more – the same way those banks don't rely on the Libor interest rate any more.

Which is why the DOJ should cast its net wider. Ultimately, the DOJ lawsuit against S&P may make a splash, but it probably won't be a deterrent. The only thing that will do that is banks and investors forcing ratings firms to behave differently.

That's easy in times of calm, like now, but much harder in bubble times, when greed rules.