Lalit Modi camp gears up for final showdown

When Lalit Modi goes to the Board of Control for Cricket in India office on Friday to submit his reply on the showcause notice, it is unlikely that he will carry a mere folder of papers. He might take along with him a mini-truck load of papers, if not a big truck. The suspended chairman of the Indian Premier League is getting ready to take the fight to his rival camp.

A battery of lawyers, headed by Ram Jethmalani, Harish Salve and Amit Desai, are working overtime at a plush city hotel, preparing a threadbare reply. By Tuesday, there were a few trunk loads of papers ready which Modi is likely to submit in the next four days. By the end of the extended deadline, the trunks would double or triple.

The Modi camp’s strategy has been to expose the loopholes in the case. On Monday, it seems he has partly succeeded in his mission when BCCI secretary N Srinivasan stated in a mail that some of the charges were based on media reports and oral evidence. “It has been their strategy to lead a story to the media and use that against him,” said a Modi camp follower. “How can media reports be evidence?” he asked.

On Tuesday, Modi was given the documents he sought to substantiate the charges against him. But on a few other charges, the Board said it did not have the papers.

“We had asked for some documents from the Board. We needed documentary support for at least 10 references made in the showcause notice out of which four have been provided to us today,” Mehmood Abdi, a lawyer working for Modi, said.

“Board secretary (N Srinivasan) has written in an email to Modi that other references made in the showcause notice for which we wanted documentary support were oral transactions or verbal communications and there is no documentary proof for those,” Modi’s counsel said.

The suspended IPL chief asked for documents for charges of financial irregularities and bid-rigging. Abdi said the four documents handed over to him included an agreement, two letters, one email and a copy of shareholding pattern of an IPL franchisee. The Board is believed to have given him letters and emails on Nimbus communications who are the BCCI’s broadcast right holders.

Abdi also claimed that Modi, on his part, had handed over all the documents that were asked for by the BCCI following the voluminous second lot that he had delivered to the Board on Monday.