The Indian government promised on Monday a full probe into the finances of the cash-rich Indian Premier League (IPL) after a high-profile minister quit amid a damaging ownership scandal.
Shashi Tharoor, a former top United Nations diplomat, resigned Sunday as junior foreign minister over allegations of corruption in the lucrative cricket league.
“No guilty [person] or wrongdoer will be spared,” Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee told Parliament.
The IPL counts Bollywood stars and billionaire entrepreneurs among its franchise owners.
“All aspects including sources of funding” will be probed, Mukherjee said. “Appropriate action as per [the] law would be taken.”
Tax authorities already raided the IPL’s Mumbai headquarters last week.
Tharoor’s exit marked a dramatic fall from grace for the former UN undersecretary-general, who swapped international diplomacy for India’s political rough and tumble, winning a seat in the southern state of Kerala in last year’s election.
Pressure had been building on Tharoor to step down after news broke a week ago that a woman, Sunanda Pushkar, identified by Indian media as his girlfriend, was given a free stake in a new IPL franchise.
Opposition parties say the stake, worth $15-million, was for Tharoor’s behind-the-scenes services in putting together the consortium that bought the Kochi team, which will be based in Kerala.
Tharoor, a reformist-minded politician known for courting controversy with his colourful remarks on the micro-blogging site Twitter, denied any wrongdoing and insisted he had helped only by “mentoring” the Kochi bid.
His last Twitter post on Friday was defiant.
“Thanks for all the support & good wishes. U folks are the new India. We will ‘be the change’ we wish to see in our country. But not w’out pain!” he wrote.
Tharoor said the deal under which Pushkar had been awarded the stake was for work she had done and would do for the new consortium, in what he described as “a common practice around the world” for start-ups.
Pushkar, described by the Indian media as an “events manager and brand builder”, vehemently denied acting as a proxy for Tharoor in the consortium, calling the charges “insulting”.
The main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party demanded an investigation into the IPL, which it labelled “the Corruption Premier League”.
Details of the Kochi franchise’s stakeholders had first been leaked on his Twitter site by IPL founder and boss Lalit Modi, who found himself under fire on Monday.
Opposition MPs in parliament alleged that the IPL was a front for illicit gambling — charges denied by Modi who called them an “attempt to discredit” the league.
Modi’s future was uncertain with the Press Trust of India quoting on Monday an unnamed senior source at the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) as saying that Modi’s departure from the IPL was “a foregone conclusion”.
“The BCCI members are extremely unhappy in the manner in which he brought about this controversy,” the source said, according to the news agency.
League franchise owners were being summoned for a meeting in Mumbai at which Modi’s fate was to be discussed, according to the CNN-IBN television network. — Reuters