Manoj Badale

London, April 28: Manoj Badale, the chairman of the Rajasthan Royals, does not think there is anything fundamentally wrong with the Indian Premier League but has qualified his defence of suspended commissioner Lalit Modi with the remark: “If there have been any wrong-doings, there have to be consequences.”

Badale, 42, who lives in the UK and heads a company called Emerging Media, believes that the IPL must make the most of a promising start.

“It’s an opportunity to take stock of what’s been quite a meteoric rise of a sporting event,” he told BBC Radio Five Live.

Badale, the second biggest shareholder in the Rajasthan Royals with 32.4 per cent, referred to the charge of the relatives of Modi holding a stake in the team but denied there was anything untoward in the bidding process for the Royals.

“It’s utterly baseless. We submitted our bid in compliance with the BCCI. The chief allegation against us is we have friends and family of Lalit in the consortium. That was all declared very transparently.”

The family of Suresh Chellaram, the brother-in-law of Modi, is the largest stakeholder (44.2 per cent) in the team that has drawn investments from actress Shilpa Shetty’s husband.

Badale said: “When you’re raising money for a start-up business, very often it’s your friends that back you and invest in you and that’s what’s happened with the IPL. It was all disclosed at the time and no questions were raised then but three years on, when the tournament’s a big success and these franchises are supposedly worth lots, questions are being raised left, right and centre.”

Badale acknowledged that a change at the top might be a natural evolution for the tournament.

“Lalit had a particular style that’s clearly rubbed some people up the wrong way. For anyone who’s started a business, decisions need to be made quickly. Very often, the commercial context that surrounds much of cricket makes it difficult to get fast decisions taken. It’s easy with hindsight to describe (Modi’s style) as autocratic, but one of the reasons the IPL was able to evolve so quickly was it had a simple and rapid decision-making process. As tournaments and businesses get bigger, those processes need to evolve.”

Badale is a man with certain standing in British Asian society — he was an undergraduate at Emmanuel College, graduated with a degree in economics in 1990 and still hangs out with his old Cambridge University chums.

He is also the chairman of the trustees of British Asian Trust, one of Prince Charles’s charities, which raises money for causes such as education and health, both in Britain and in India. Charles is the president of the trust.

In his interview with the BBC, Badale played down the apparent crisis within the IPL.

“There’s a short-term image issue,” he insisted. “But this tournament is enormous now and it will outlive this crisis.”

But he conceded: “It’s time to take stock, to look at the governance, to address the allegations.”

Born in Dhule, Maharashtra, Badale “is the co-founder of Blenheim Chalcot, a management company set up with his business partner Charles Mindenhall to actively manage their portfolio of businesses which they have started since 1998.

Manoj and Charles’s first venture was Netdecisions group, an Internet services provider, which has evolved into a broad-based IT services and outsourcing business, now trading as Agilisys.

While starting Netdecisions, they co-founded a number of Internet start-ups — the First Resort, mad about wine (now part of Fosters) and woowho (now part of match.com).

In New Delhi, Modi today met lawyers Harish Salve and Ram Jethmalani, reports PTI. He also sent a series of tweets on IPL statistics.