The founder of IPL Lalit Modi has accused serious allegations of auction rigging involving CSK and former owner Srinivasan on match-fixing.
His accusations come after the conclusion of the IPL 2025 mega auction. Speaking to Raj Shamani on his YouTube show ‘Figuring Out’ Lalit made an explosive claim that Srinivasan who was the BCCI secretary was not quite in favour of IPL.
“He (N Srinivasan) didn’t like IPL; he didn’t think IPL will work but when it started to work everybody got the bandwagon. He was a member and secretary of the board also so he was the biggest adversary of mine. I went up against him, so he did many things, umpire fixing, he said, ‘I did it’, Lalit Modi said.
“I accused him for it. He would change the umpire and I didn’t think two things about it. But then I realized he is putting Chennai umpire in Chennai games, it’s an issue for me. That’s called fixing so when I tried to expose those, he went totally against me,” he added.
Modi accused Srinivasan of fixing IPL auction so that he could acquire England all-rounder Andrew Flintoff ahead of 2009. Hence a message was sent to each of the other franchises to not bid for the player.
“Take out everything auction ringing, this ringing, I gave Flintoff to Srinivasan. Yes, we did. No doubt about it, every team knew about it. Srinivasan wasn’t going to let IPL happen. He was a thorn in our bush. Yes, we told everybody not to bid for [Andrew] Flintoff,” he said.
“Yes, that I did because Srinivasan said I want Flintoff. But when you are trying to do an event like IPL and I did it single-handedly, you need to remove every thorn, what is bigger for the game. Every player is only for three months,” Lalit Modi added.
CSK has found themselves in the midst of a major spot fixing scandal in 2013, for which Gurunath Meiyappan, a top official of the franchise and son in law of Srinivasan, was arrested on charges of cheating, forgery and fraud.
It is revealed that Gurunat was in constant telephonic contact with actor Virender “Vindoo” Dara Singh who also was arrested for alleged contact with bookies.
He was later banned for life any involvement in cricket matches by Lodah committe, whoc suspended India cements and Jaipur, the owners of the CSK and RR teams for a period of two years.
