In a big development, the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) has declined former IPL commissioner Lalit Modi’s lucrative 10-year buy-out offer of their franchise-based property 'The Hundred'.
According to the Daily Telegraph report, the ECB is not ready to risk its healthy relationship with the Board of Control for Cricket in India.
Notably, Modi was a key figure in running the IPL from 2008 to 2010. He fled from India to seek asylum in the United Kingdom in 2010 amid investigations into tax evasion and money laundering.
"Modi's representatives met with Vikram Banerjee, the England and Wales Cricket Board's director of operations, who is de facto head of the Hundred, and chief executive Richard Gould to lay out a 10-year offer to buy the Hundred and fund it through private investment. However, the ECB will not be pursuing talks with Modi," the Daily Telegraph reported.
The British daily further reported that the ECB is also worried about potential pitfalls of a partnership as "dealing with Modi would jeopardise its relationship with the BCCI."
It is worth mentioning here that the ECB had received a similar offer from the Bridgepoint Group worth GBP 400 million for a 75 per cent stake in 'The Hundred'.
"At the time, Richard Thompson, the ECB's chairman, said he would only consider offers of a “few billion” and since then the ECB has pursued a strategy of selling equity in the teams, with the board retaining ownership of the competition," the newspaper reported.
Speaking to the Telegraph Sport, Modi recently said that "he has lined up investors willing to pump money into a 10-team tournament but told the ECB the Hundred format does not work and should be converted into a Twenty20 competition instead."
As per the offer sheet, the team purse would have been USD 10 million per season (roughly INR 83 crore to IPL's INR 95 Cr).
Modi's estimated valuation of the competition was earmarked at USD 100 million per year over a decade. In fact, the former IPL commissioner had suggested ECB not to invite more than two IPL franchises to own teams.
His mantra was "franchises should be English owned and English run with minimal input from India."
Modi was in touch with English cricket officials for the past 18 months and he was keen to make it the second biggest league after IPL.
"I would give them a guarantee of a billion dollars," Modi told Telegraph Sport.
"A lot of people have been in touch with me interested in backing it and I made a proposal to the ECB but it had a lot of conditions. The Hundred format does not work and there should only be two franchises sold to Indian buyers. It will only work if it is an English competition and not Indo-centric," he said.
(With PTI Inputs)
