The email on projected earnings for IPL team-owners sent by MoS Civil Aviation Praful Patel's office to then Union minister Shashi Tharoor appears to be aimed at creating an impression that the IPL was a loss-making business.
The numbers in the excel sheet emailed to Tharoor make a compelling case for not bidding anything over Rs 1,250 crore for a team. It suggests that even at that price, the owners stand to lose a whopping Rs 608 crore after 10 years.
The email was allegedly first sent by IPL CEO Sundar Raman to Praful's daughter Poorna Patel, who works for IPL. Poorna then forwarded the email to Praful's office from where it reached Tharoor.
In the document, Raman says that the central revenue pool in 2011 - the first season for the two new IPL teams - is approximately Rs 60 crore.
But one knows that the central revenue pool for 2010 is already double that figure - Rs 120 crore. This is because of the consistent slicing of the rights pie.
The email sent by Raman to Poorna was also copied to IPL commissioner Lalit Modi. The objective behind the calculations in it seems to be to mislead Rendezvous Sports - which has a stake in the Kochi team - that revenues would only be Rs 102 crore if one adds local sponsorship, gate receipts, hospitality and licensing.
The scaled down estimates offered were meant to make Rendezvous bid low.
If the math was properly and factually presented, the revenues would be Rs 175 crore and the expenses would be Rs 190 crore, amounting to a loss of just Rs 15 crore in the first year.
There is another reason to believe that the motive behind sending these scaled down estimates to Tharoor was to get Rendezvous Sports out of the bidding race.
Raman's math shows only the broadcast revenues being factored into the central revenue pool. But the truth is that starting this year, there's more money coming in from Colors, YouTube, Maxx, Karbonn, digital and mobile rights, MRF and UFO Moviez.
But Rendezvous Sports played smart. It conferred with two top cricketers from the past and present and bid much more aggressively, thereby beating Raman and Modi's gameplan. By adding 33 per cent to its bid, Rendezvous Sports won the bidding.
- Sandeep Bamzai is a business analyst
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