On Wednesday, 14th April, 2010, the controversy between the Kochi franchise team and Lalit Modi took a vibrant turn, with the IPL Commissioner being accused of offering a bribe to the team. The franchise team made this startling claim of Modi offering them almost 50 million dollars to give up the franchise.
This breaking news came to the various news channels, with such a big amount being offered to back out from a position. This news came afresh after one week of the declaration of the bid which was in favor of the Kochi team. It was said that Mr. Modi called up the investor from Rendezvous Sailendra to give the million dollar offer if he quits the game forever. In this case, the investor thought that since he have won the bid, worked hard for the last seven months, and to get the bid, they did not agree, then there were the possibility of some delay tactics taking place with creation of confusion by Modi. In that case, the investor is of two minds as to why they got to won the bid.
This is a million dollar question which Mr. Modi would definitely need to answer for the Kochi team as per their spokesperson, Satyajit Gaekwad. He further added that after this issue, the team would definitely not go ahead with such offer put forward by Mr. Modi. Rather, having won the bid, the team would go ahead and make the IPL franchisee Kochi a grand success.
On the other hand, Mr. Modi had other answer for the channels saying he had no role to play at all. He said that he can’t bribe somebody to give him the franchises as he himself is not a bidder in the first place. As per his opinion, there is no reason of giving any team a bribe, as in doing so, it would lead to cancellation of the tender and to a new tender lead.