Lalit Modi — He Invented Cricket’s Richest League, Then Ran It Like It Was His

Lalit Modi built the Indian Premier League out of nothing in 2008 and turned it, within two years, into one of the most valuable competitions in world sport. He was its founder, its chairman, and its commissioner — and on September 25, 2013, the Board of Control for Cricket in India expelled him and banned him for life from holding any post in cricket administration. The verdict on the record is a sporting one: the BCCI’s Special General Meeting in Chennai unanimously accepted its disciplinary committee’s findings that Modi was guilty of serious misconduct and indiscipline, and ruled that he would never again be “entitled to hold any position or office” in the game he had reinvented.

The disciplinary committee, which delivered a 134-page report, found him guilty on eight counts that describe a man who ran a public institution as a personal enterprise: rigging the franchise auctions by slipping onerous tender clauses in and out to favor preferred bidders; selling broadcast, media, and internet rights without authorization from the board he answered to; steering television rights to a favored agency; and failing to disclose the stakes people close to him quietly held in the league’s franchises and digital business. The IPL was a triumph. The way Modi held the levers of it was, in the board’s judgment, a conflict of interest in motion.

It is worth stating plainly what this verdict is and is not. Modi has been banned for life by cricket’s governing body in India; he has not been criminally convicted. India’s Enforcement Directorate opened multiple investigations into alleged foreign-exchange violations running into hundreds of millions of dollars, and the matters have ground on for more than a decade, but no criminal conviction is on record. Modi decamped to London in 2010, days after his suspension, and has remained in the UK ever since, contesting the allegations and declining to return. The ban is enforced; the man is abroad.

What follows is how the most successful start-up in the history of cricket became a case study in the danger of letting its inventor also be its referee.