New Delhi, June 4: Suspended IPL commissioner Lalit Modi, locked in a battle with the Indian cricket board, today said the Twenty20 league’s interim chairman Chirayu Amin was part of a consortium that made an unsuccessful bid for a team in March.

Modi said Aniruddha Deshpande, the managing director of City Corporation in which Union minister Sharad Pawar and his family have a 16 per cent share, made the bid in March for an IPL franchise. “There were three members in the consortium that was part of the bid. They were Aniruddha, Akruti and Chirayu Amin,” Modi said. “It’s a fact of life and I cannot change or distort facts. They were the bidders.”

Amin, who heads the Baroda Cricket Association, was quoted by TV channels as admitting that he had agreed to make an investment of up to 10 per cent “through one of our associates”. But he clarified that he had written to the BCCI about his investment and “further clearances” would have been taken if the bid succeeded. “There was, therefore, total transparency at every step,” Amin was quoted as saying.

Modi was grounded following the controversy over the Kochi IPL consortium in which a friend of then Union minister Shashi Tharoor was offered a sweat equity.

Modi had hurled a counter-charge against BCCI secretary N. Srinivasan, whose company India Cements holds the Chennai franchise.

A petition against Srinivasan’s continuation as BCCI secretary is pending in court but the cricket board has paved the way for his stay by amending its rules that kept T20 matches out of the purview of a clause that says no administrator can have any direct or indirect commercial interest in events conducted by the board.