Calcutta: It can’t be proved, unless a spy-cam was in operation, but the Jagmohan Dalmiya group has alleged a high-profile Sharad Pawar backer “bribed” an office-bearer of an affiliated unit of the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) in the lead-up to the contentious 76th AGM.

The “bribe,” one learns, was offered and accepted at the hotel hosting the AGM on Thursday morning. It hardly comes as a surprise as, nowadays, there’s less of cricket and more of everything else in the AGMs.

“We have no doubt that money changed hands and there was even talk of tipping off the Enforcement people to raid a particular room. Eventually, we decided against it as the entire BCCI would have been hurt,” a well-placed source told The Telegraph.

The source, a leading light of the Dalmiya group, added: “It’s one thing to pull strings politically and involve industrialists, quite another to actually bribe somebody. It’s possible that bribes were offered to others as well.”

Incidentally, allegations of bribe had surfaced during one of the AGMs in the late 1990s, too.