New Delhi: Former IPL Chairman and fugitive Lalit Modi has claimed that he left cricket administration because of threats from underworld boss Dawood Ibrahim and his gang, D Company.
“Dawood Ibrahim is a known bookmaker. He controlled the cricket book,” Modi said in an interview with ANI’s Smita Prakash on Thursday.
Modi also added that the trouble began when he refused to play along with bookies dealing in the multi-billion dollar “Satta Bazaar (gambling market).” By closely watching for fake signals during games and cracking down hard on match fixing, he messed with their illegal betting, Modi said.
“In those days, it used to be $2 billion of underground betting. Today, it’s a $4 billion underground betting game. It’s unimaginably huge. Every ball, there’s an odd chance. It’s the Satta Bazaar. Nobody fixes games anymore. You fix overs. You fix the ball,” Modi said.
One of the biggest claims Modi made was that he rejected “hundreds of millions of dollars” in bribe to overlook corruption. In 2012, Modi claimed, Dawood Ibrahim directly pressed him over a speakerphone to help the gang control an IPL team.
“They offered me hundreds of millions of dollars to look the other way… If you look at the first three years, when I ran the IPL, there was no fixing… It wasn’t liked by the mafia,” Modi said.
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Deaths threats, kidnapping
He also spoke about several death threats and intimidating incidents, claiming that a shootout had happened outside his Mumbai house in 2009, following which he got Z-category security.
Modi further stated that hitmen were hired to get rid of him in Johannesburg, and claimed that his son was briefly kidnapped in London when tensions were at peak.
He also claimed that moving IPL Season 2 to South Africa in 2009 cost underground betting groups a lot of money. Back then, he said, crime gangs were agitated because the move threw off their illegal setup.
“…the hits were being put on me because I moved IPL to South Africa… They had placed bets that it would not move to South Africa. So they lost a lot of money, apparently, and wanted me to make good that money,” said Modi.
(Edited by Aamaan Alam Khan)