$5 million bailout for Chennai Super Kings and Rajasthan Royals?

The Board of Control for Cricket in India has surprised everyone by doling out a compensation package of $5 million to both the IPL sides which had qualified for the Champions League of cricket in the previous season. The Champions League was then cancelled due to a terrorists attack in the city of Mumbai just days before the supposed start of the tournament in the first week of December.

It must be remembered that Chennai Super Kings and Rajasthan Royals were the two sides which had entered the finals of the IPL, 2008, and by this virtue managed to qualify for the Champions League. The tournament was supposed to be an eight-side one with the aforementioned two sides from India, and six other sides from Australia, South Africa, England and Pakistan. Every side was supposed to gain a minimum guarantee money of $500,000, apart from a prize money of $6 million shared between the winners, runner-up, and the losing semi-finalists. This means that the tournament winner may not have won more than $2.5 million, making a bailout package of $5 million much more than expected. The payment hasn’t been made to any of the other sides involved in the Champions League.

The Chennai Super Kings is owned by the India Cements. India Cements is an Indian company which is co-owned by N. Srinivasan, who is the secretary of the BCCI and one of the governing council members of the IPL and Champions League council.

The agreement signed between the teams and the Champions League council carries out a clause which says that there will not be any kind of compensation paid out by the Champions League in case of a cancellation, but, if the individual cricket boards decided, they could hand out some kind of compensation for sure.

Lalit Modi was contacted about this, but apart from confirming the decision of the payout, there wasn’t much forthcoming from him.

Victoria and Western Australia, who had also qualified for the Champions League last year have also been tipped to receive some kind of a payment from their cricket board, but nothing in this vicinity of money.

There has been a mixed response to this from within the Indian cricket board. Some within the cricketing circles have already said that this could create issues in the future if something like this were to repeat. However, some of the others say that this is only a part of the contract and it was the duty of the cricket board to help out its stake-holders.

One can sense that this is not the last one has heard of this issue, and a controversy could brew over to something drastic.