Indian Premier League (IPL) founder and former chairman Lalit Modi has claimed that threats linked to fugitive gangster Dawood Ibrahim were among the biggest reasons behind his decision to step away from cricket administration, including three assasination attempts and the kidnapping of his son.
"He took three hits at me... Dawood himself said this... He missed three times..” said Lalit in an interview with ANI on Thursday, alleging that he survived multiple assassination attempts and faced sustained pressure from the mafia because of his refusal to allow match-fixing during the early years of the IPL.
The former IPL chief claimed the threats were not limited to attempts on his life.
"My son was kidnapped in London. I have not told this story to anybody," Modi said, alleging a sustained campaign of pressure and intimidation directed at him and his family.
Among the three assassination attempts, Lalit alleged that one threat emerged in Mumbai, another in South Africa during the 2009 IPL, and a third in Montenegro. He said Indian and foreign security agencies intercepted intelligence related to the alleged plots.
“Bombay police recorded everything. Bombay police put me on Z security... There was a shootout outside my house in Bombay. There was a hit for me in Johannesburg when I was in Cape Town, which was picked up by the South African government. There was a hit on me in Montenegro, which was picked up at the Croatian border, he said.”
Lalit Modi said underworld figures offered him enormous sums of money to ignore fixing attempts, but he refused.
According to him, this resistance made him a target of criminal syndicates that had hoped to profit from manipulating matches and betting outcomes.
“They offered me hundreds of millions of dollars to look the other way,” he said, adding that there was "no fixing" during the first three years of the IPL under his leadership.
Betting syndicates and alleged underworld links came under intense scrutiny during the 2013 IPL spot-fixing scandal, when Delhi Police arrested Rajasthan Royals players S. Sreesanth, Ajit Chandila and Ankeet Chavan on charges related to spot-fixing.
The probe later expanded into a wider investigation into illegal betting networks operating across India and overseas.
The investigation was led by then Delhi Police Commissioner Neeraj Kumar, who repeatedly spoke about the deep-rooted nature of illegal betting syndicates.
While reports at the time frequently speculated about links between bookies and the D-Company network headed by Dawood Ibrahim, Kumar had said investigators did not possess conclusive evidence directly tying Dawood himself to the scandal.
Lalit has faced multiple allegations of financial irregularities since 2010. He was suspended by the BCCI that year and was later handed a life ban after the board found him guilty of several counts of misconduct, including matters related to financial and administrative irregularities, though Modi has consistently denied wrongdoing, according to a report by The Guardian.