During the recently held ICC quarterly meeting, the BCCI was told by cricket’s governing body to get tax exemption for hosting the forthcoming ICC events like 2021 T20 World Cup and 2023 ODI World Cup.
If the Indian board fails to get the exemption, it will have to bear the tax burden for staging the global tournaments in the country. However, the decision has not gone down too well with the certain sections of BCCI officials.
In an interview with IANS, a senior BCCI official made it clear that the ICC is free to move the tournaments out of India as matters related to tax need government's approval.
"We will abide by what the Tax Department and the Ministry decides on this. We would love for the World Cup to take place here, but if the ICC wants to play hard ball, they must be ready for everything. If they want to take the ICC tournament out of India, it's fine. Let BCCI then take the revenue out of the ICC and see who loses more,” the board official quoted.
"Those in-charge of administration are trying to take policy decisions without jurisdiction to do so. The ICC will find it difficult to hold the BCCI to those decisions since a lot of these decisions do not have the approval of the board," he added.
Another BCCI official commented on the same, saying that ICC seems to be looking at every possible opportunity to hurt India's interest.
"It was found earlier that the ICC had a different contract with different member boards. For example, Cricket Australia was only required to make best endeavours to get tax exemption while the BCCI was required to ensure tax exemption,” he said.
"See, this is a result of a situation where the present BCCI is found wanting. The CoA bigwig wants to show that he is in control of things and whenever that happens, the democratic functioning of an organisation is the first casualty.
"There is no way that the BCCI should agree to this. The ICC cannot on the one hand say that they aim to have an inclusive approach and on the other hand look at every possible opportunity to hurt India's interest," the official signed off.
It is pertinent to mention here that the ICC gets tax exemption from member nations for conducting global events but it didn't get any for the 2016 World T20 as Indian tax laws don't allow any such leeway.
