New Delhi, April 14 (Inditop.com) An ugly IPL row involving Minister of State for External Affairs Shashi Tharoor escalated Wednesday with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh promising action only after determining facts and a woman friend of the minister finally breaking her silence on the controversy.
Even as Indian Premier League (IPL) commissioner Lalit Modi stood his ground, Sunanda Pushkar, the woman who is reported to have shares in a company that has stake in the IPL Kochi team, has denied being a proxy to Tharoor even as she admits to being his friend.
While the opposition continues to demand Tharoor’s sacking on grounds of impropriety, a man was Wednesday detained by police here on the suspicion of sending an SMS threat to Tharoor.
Commenting for the first time since the controversy broke out two days ago, Manmohan Singh said in Washington that he was not aware of the facts of the case.
“I don’t have all the facts. When I go back, I will get the facts and will take action … if required,” he told journalists. “We can’t go by hearsay and media reports.”
The prime minister’s remarks came a day ahead of the resumption of the budget session of Indian parliament where the opposition is determined to corner the government over the IPL controversy.
On Wednesday, the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) and the Communist Party of India (CPI) echoed the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) demand that Tharoor be thrown out of the ministry.
“It now transpires that a person associated with him has got 19 percent free equity worth Rs.70 crore in the company that led the consortium which got the (IPL Kochi) franchise,” the CPI-M said in a statement. “It is incumbent upon Tharoor to step down from office till his name is cleared of any unethnical or irregular behaviour.”
The CPI went a step further and asked Manmohan Singh to sack Tharoor for misusing his official position.
The only consolation for Tharoor was a statement from his friend Pushkar, who hit out at her critics and denied being a proxy to the minister.
Breaking her silence, Pushkar told IANS: “My own business interests and assets are substantial, and efforts to besmirch Tharoor by presenting me as a proxy for him are personally insulting for me as a woman and as a friend.”
She said she had been contacted by Rendezvous Sports World, one of the consortium members of the Kochi IPL franchise, to take advantage of “my extensive international experience as a business executive, marketing manager and entrepreneur”.
“Because this is a start-up effort, I was told that in lieu of a salary they would grant me minor equity in Rendezvous in return for my efforts, a common practice across the world for… projects of this nature.”
Modi made an explosive revelation Sunday that Pushkar had got free equity in the Kerala team worth Rs.70 crore (around $15 million) and that Tharoor had called him not to reveal the ownership pattern in the team.
While Tharoor declined comment, Modi told the media in Mumbai that there was indeed a question mark over the Kochi team’s ownership and that the owners themselves did not know some of the people involved with it.
But Modi, pulled up over the issue by Indian cricket board chief Shashank Manohar, called it “a small issue”. “We have no hidden agenda, no hidden stakes,” he said.
Tharoor, a former UN official who joined the Congress last year and was elected to the Lok Sabha from Thiruvananthapuram, has been under the scanner ever since he became a minister.
The Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT) said that the Directorate General of Investigation in Kochi had ordered a probe to ascertain if money had been channelled illegally into the Kochi IPL team from tax havens abroad.
rounak