Senior advocate Gopal Subramaniam, representing the Mukul Mudgal led IPL probe committee, which looked into the allegations of betting, and spot/match fixing revealed that the audio recordings conducted during the probe were leaked.
Subramaniam told the court that the panel had stopped the audio recording of its proceedings held at a five star hotel in New Delhi after the panel members suspected that a copy of the audio tapes was being made available to someone outside the panel without their knowledge or permission.
The BCCI was in-charge of recording the proceedings on audio and had assigned necessary personnel to conduct the process. The identity of the person or persons entrusted by the BCCI hasn’t been reveled yet.
It is still unclear why the panel members did not lodge a police complaint or inform the SC about this alleged snooping. If they had done that, a criminal case would have been registered against the accused.
Subramaniam also blamed the BCCI for not keeping its promise of ensuring high quality audio and told the SC that the recordings are of poor quality. Subramaniam revealed that recordings were meant to be deleted from the system immediately after they were given to the panel but that procedure was not followed in some cases.
Although, the stopping of the recording does not mean that the panel has no proof of some of the depositions made in front of them as everything that was said has been incorporated in the minutes of the meetings.
Meanwhile, SC directed the probe panel to give BCCI the recordings of the depositions made by MS Dhoni, Srinivasan and IPL COO, Sundar Raman. The Mudgal panel's legal team had carried them, and others, on a pen-drive but the bench asked them to just submit the three recordings. They will then be heard by BCCI counsel, Amit Sibal and Rohini Musa, in the presence of the Secretary General of the Court. But this was done with a huge rider. "Any content of the audio recordings going out means cricket would be blackened in the country," the bench said.
Earlier, the Supreme Court rejected the three-member Board of Control for Cricket in India panel that was proposed to investigate the Indian Premier League 2013 scam. Instead, the apex court entrusted Justice Mukul Mudgal to continue the probe.
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