Lait Modi: “Yes, Sushma Swaraj did help, but I would have got the papers anyway,”

He was cricket’s most powerful impresario. Then, in a fall that was as dramatic as his rise, he became the game’s face of disgrace. Today, from his billionaire-appointed exile in London, unfazed by the controversy swirling around his name back home, he vows to fight till he is vindicated. Open contributor James Astill meets Lalit Modi, defiant and delusional, at his new law firm in London

Tucked into the north end of Shepherd Market, a higgledy corner of Mayfair known for centuries for its high-end brothels, is a discreet black door, half hidden by an archway, with a buzzer bearing the legend: ‘Linderborg Law’. Like the market’s traditional business establishments, it is designed to welcome only those who know what goes on inside, not to enlighten those who do not. I press the buzzer, wait five minutes for the door to open, then am ushered silently in by a short, unsmiling factotum, later known to me as Saeed.

Lalit Modi is on the second floor, seated at a boardroom table in an otherwise empty room. He does not acknowledge me, so consumed is he by the business at hand. “Tell them to get it to you and what sort of a model you want, and they’ll do it,” he is saying, in his characteristic half- shout, to his younger brother Samir, who apparently needs a new iPhone. Then Lalit looks up and says, by way of a greeting: “So, this is my new law firm.”

I am surprised. “But Lalit, you’re not a lawyer, are you?”

He waves away the idiot question: “Not a lawyer, no, but an investor. It’s a new venture I’ve invested in, a law firm, or law practice, or rather a law consultancy firm.

“Our potential clients, and there are quite a few of them, are people who have been politically targeted,” he says, after ushering me upstairs to another almost-empty room. “Let’s just state simply, I’m an ideal client for this law firm, or law consultancy firm. It’s a very good business. We have lots of Russian clients, lots of international clients, now we are starting an Indian operation. We have an Australian operation, we have a Middle East operation, an American operation, so we are expanding.”

For his many complicated legal battles, waged in London, Delhi and elsewhere, Lalit Modi has used over a dozen law and professional services firms. To spare others with similar complications that trouble, he explains, his idea is to bring together the best of his councillors into a handy, Lalit-curated “one-stop shop”. “With the experience that I have in the last five years of being a political victim, a lot of friends of mine, or people that I know, started coming to me saying, ‘Can you advise us? Can you help us? Can you put us in touch with X, Y, Z, who you have used and not used? And what is your thought process and how have you handled this matter? Because you have successfully fought in England, fought in India, gone to the international courts, whether it was Interpol-related, involved fiscal issues…’ or the whole different areas that I was attacked under.”

Then Lalit Modi pauses, as if momentarily perplexed. He appears not to remember the name of his brilliant new venture. “It’s, no … one second,” he says, grabbing his phone and rifling hurriedly through emails. “I’m just looking for this, now, how do you spell it? Yes, Lindeborg Law, L-I-N-D-E-B-O-R-G.”

It is a couple of years since I last met up with Lalit Modi, at a launch-party for my book on Indian cricket, The Great Tamasha. He had invited himself, which I found a bit unnerving at the time. The book, a tour through the rank politics and corruption that have ballooned in Indian cricket with its riches, was not unstintingly complimentary about the IPL’s founder and former commissioner. It described the perennial scandals in his creation, the rumours of match-fixing, the sordid rows and conflicts of interest, the $80 million kickback—or ‘facilitation fee’— he was alleged to have pocketed on a convoluted broadcasting deal, and which in turn led to his suspension by the BCCI and (though he denied that it was linked) sudden relocation to London.

I had interviewed him in a Mayfair restaurant shortly after his flight, close to the vast, lavish flat he had settled in. Thin, pale and agitated, protesting his innocence with varying degrees of emphasis, he had seemed a shrunken figure, almost unrecognisable from the swollen celebrity who bestrode the IPL and its glamorous pitches shortly before. Very likely, it seemed, he was bound for further disgrace or, arguably worse in Lalit’s eyes, irrelevance. Yet he had showed up for my book party, two years later, undaunted and in fine form. He looked well, having gained weight and lost his pallor. He was exceptionally friendly and great fun, the life and soul of a lively crowd. Brimming with charm, he bought a pile of signed copies to boot; he asked me to dedicate one to his cricket-loving son, Ruchir.

That was heroic chutzpah—but as nothing compared to the audacity of Lalit’s most recent makeover. The IPL founder and target of multiple investigations, at least one or two of which appear to be ongoing, who has been banned for life by an organisation for which he made hundreds of millions of dollars, and who had only the day before our meeting been hit with a fresh summons from India’s Enforcement Directorate, has rebranded himself as a political dissident, a voice of the voiceless and an anti-corruption crusader. “I’m going to take the bull by the head and go for a total clean-up,” he says. “If it takes me a few years, that’s what it will take me. I’ve set up a new apolitical organisation to clean up corruption and clean up personal vendettas, and I’m going to take this as a headlong thing. Fortunately, I have the resources to do so.”

“I’ve started something life-changing going forward,” he proceeds, again fiddling with his phone, looking for his latest new website. “You will see it in the next minutes, or hours. Look—this is my new fight, basically. It got my approval a few minutes ago. It should be live by the time you start writing the story,” he says, holding out his phone to display Fightcorruption.org, through which he plans to keep up the pressure on his many enemies in India: in the BCCI, the Congress party and the highest echelons of the BJP Government. It is to be a vehicle for the many spicy, sometimes incredible, allegations he puts out daily for his million-odd followers on Twitter, and which India’s media—including Open—are restrained by libel laws from picking up as he, though famously litigious himself, says they should.

“This is where there’ll be breaking news, where I’m going to break everything,” he enthuses. “It’ll break here in video form, in multiple languages. I’m also starting a YouTube channel.” Of those allegations, more later.

The website will also be a lot about Lalit Modi himself. “I’m going to document my life with video link-up,” he says, speaking so fast in his enthusiasm that he becomes hard to follow. “I’m going to start cutting every day two or three videos and start putting documents out, from 1993 to 2015. I’m going to send you a drop box documenting my life in cricket and sports, from 1993 until now. It’ll be all my clips. You’ll see my life. I can tell you it’s consistent with every statement I’ve made.”

The website’s homepage is dominated by a picture of Lalit Modi, in trademark Armani suit and pink silk tie, superimposed over a cricket pitch, inside a half-filled Indian stadium. He is gazing into the distance, a heroic figure, long-suffering, far-seeing. The website is a vehicle for a personality cult, which, despite Lalit Modi’s large Twitter following, does not actually exist. ‘I created aspirations for billions’, reads a slogan displayed next to the IPL commissioner-turned-seer, on a saffron, white and green background. Next to it is another of Lalit Modi’s favourite slogans: ‘#NotAFugitive’.

The obvious point here is that Lalit Modi is irrepressible. Having once tasted celebrity, he is unshakeably convinced of his importance to cricket, India and the world. There is, on first meeting him, a flicker of shyness apparent in his face; never any hesitancy in his claims to global significance. Apparently unshameable, he is, in a war of words, not merely formidable, but invulnerable. And he is rich, too, which helps a lot, his legal fees having run to millions of dollars. “Let’s put it this way,” he says. “You could probably buy the most expensive house in London. That would be cheaper than my legal bills.” Any other disgraced tycoon, with pots of money to enjoy and more to make, might have been expected to throw in the towel by now. But this is not Lalit Modi’s way. Nelson Mandela, he claims is his political hero; it should be Marshal Foch, the French general, famous for his report from the trenches of the Western front: ‘My centre is giving way, my right is retreating, situation excellent, I am attacking.’ That is Lalit Modi’s compunction. In almost any circumstance, but especially when he is challenged, he attacks.

That is the critical background to Lalit Modi’s latest spell of notoriety, which began in mid-June, when the British and Indian media began airing a fresh round of allegations against him. Keith Vaz, a Labour party MP, was alleged to have used his influence improperly on Lalit Modi’s behalf. Though Lalit Modi was not his constituent, Vaz had written to support his application for UK travel papers, Lalit Modi having been deprived of his Indian passport at the time because of his refusal to return to India to face allegations of IPL-related financial irregularity. That scandal flickered in Britain, and died. More significantly, in the process it was revealed that Sushma Swaraj had also written to the British government to support Lalit Modi’s application, shortly after the BJP administration came to power in New Delhi.

Lalit Modi, who needed the travel permit partly in order to accompany his sick wife, Minal, for treatment in Portugal, denies that Swaraj did anything wrong. “The Indian media has said she went out of her way to help me, and, yes, she did help, but I would have got the papers anyway. It was a humanitarian issue. I wrote to her on humanitarian grounds.” Nonetheless, given his tricky legal affairs, and that the BJP owed its electoral victory to Narendra Modi’s promised war on the corruption and cronyism that had bedevilled its UPA predecessor, it looked compromising for India’s External Affairs Minister. Swaraj has longstanding family ties to Lalit Modi—her husband, Swaraj Kaushal, has been Lalit Modi’s lawyer for two decades—which suggested at least a conflict of interest. Then, as so often happens around Lalit Modi, scandal bred scandal.

He, or his associates, revealed that an even closer ally of his, Vasundhara Raje, Rajasthan’s Chief Minister, had also written in his support. An old family friend of the Chief Minister, Lalit Modi had first come to public attention under her previous, scam-tainted, rule over the state. He is alleged to have directed development projects on behalf of the Chief Minister; he certainly, under her protection, executed a successful putsch to take over its cricket association, thereby launching himself on Indian cricket. This revelation raised fresh question marks over the propriety of some of Lalit Modi’s dealings with Raje. He was alleged to have paid Rs 96,000 a share for a stake in a business, Niyant Heritage Hotels Pvt Ltd, owned by her son, the BJP MP Dushyant Singh. Give that the shares’ face value was Rs 10 each, it was alleged that either the value of the company had been under-declared, or that the value of Lalit Modi’s shares had been inflated. The Congress party, whose leaders had hitherto been among the main targets of Lalit Modi’s vitriol, howled for Swaraj’s and Raje’s resignations and demanded that Lalit Modi’s namesake, the Indian Prime Minister, make a statement on the matter.

The BJP tried to brazen the scandal out—which neatly reversed the relative positions of the two parties at the time of Lalit’s fall from grace, in 2010, after he had launched a wounding attack on the then Congress minister Shashi Tharoor over his involvement in the would-be and, as it turned out, ill-fated Kochi Tuskers Kerala IPL franchise. Then it was the BJP that was howling for blood and Congress keeping schtum. Meanwhile, the Delhi rumour mill went into overdrive. The original scandal, to which Tharoor fell victim, gave rise to an allegation that Lalit Modi had attempted to rig the auction of two new IPL franchises, partly for the benefit of a leading Gujarat-based business house. Narendra Modi was the boss of the Gujarat Cricket Association at that time.

Half-comatose by its electoral beating, the Congress was suddenly revived. “This is now an issue of deep nexus between a proclaimed offender and the Prime Minister, the External Affairs Minister, the Rajasthan Chief Minister and the BJP president,” hollered Jairam Ramesh of the opposition party. “The Government has got caught in a trap of its own making. The only way out for the PM for the survival of his government and saving the monsoon session of Parliament is resignation of Sushma Swaraj and Vasundhara Raje.”

Far from irrelevant, Lalit Modi was back where he longed to be, where he thrived—on everyone’s lips, in demand from Indian media, in the thick of a high-volume, India-sized row, which he naturally did his bit to stoke. “The name Lalit Modi excites Indian media, excites the Congress party,” he told me, savouring the details of his refreshed fame. “Can you imagine? The whole country, 600 television channels, 2,000 newspapers, 23 out of 24 hours I’m carried on television. So I started something called Lalitgate, it’s the number one reality TV show, brought to you live, across 600 channels, 2,000 newspapers. What I say today is going to be the script tomorrow! I will show you a marketing hub—you want controversy? I’ll give you controversy! And that is what I’m doing now, sitting here in London.”

But, hang on, aren’t these allegations damaging for him? Having burnt his bridges with India’s former ruling party, hadn’t Lalit Modi better try not to embarrass its successor, the BJP? Not a bit of it, he says. “I can’t understand why it’s such a big deal. I really don’t understand. The press think they have found something. But what is there to find? I’ve had four years, seven months and 19 days of rigorous harassment by the Indian Government, yet to date—to date—I have not been convicted by any court of law, anywhere in the world.”

For sure, Swaraj and Raje had lent him confidential support; but what of that, he asks? Both are his old friends. He was entitled to the UK travel documents, as was proved by their subsequent issuance. And, in any event, his Indian passport was returned to him shortly afterwards: “It expunges everything,” he says. And if, as he admits, he did pay almost ten thousand times a share more for his slice of the Raje family hotel company than their face value suggested they were worth, what of that? His accusers, he says, are commercial nincompoops—a rebuttal that he, being commercially brilliant, has always enjoying making. “I paid less than market share. Today those shares are worth five times what I paid. I bought shares in that company that were good value to me.”

As for the latest notice issued by the Enforcement Directorate, Lalit vows that he and his many, expensive lawyers (including Harish Salve, allegedly the most expensive of all, who pays a call on Lalit at his new office, interrupting our interview) will take that in his stride. “I don’t know what that notice is because I haven’t seen it… It is a political vendetta issue. I don’t know. Once I’ve seen the charges, I will tell you what they relate to. My gut feeling is the notice cannot be different from any charges that have already been looked at by a court of law. They could be IPL related, which have been examined by the Supreme Court of India. I have the perfect answer for that, I hope it is that. Where is the documentary proof that I have done anything wrong? Which court of law has taken me?”

He will not be coming to India to find out, however. Lalit Modi maintains that his relocation to London was purely a security measure. The Mumbai mob were after him, he claims—with justification, police reports have suggested. “If they think I am coming to India to give them a statement, they are sadly mistaken. Why would I? Why would I take a risk with my life?”

In his metaphoric reality show, Lalit Modi has in fact spent little time refuting these latest allegations against him and much more levelling his own. They are legion, and aimed at a complacent Indian media and, he alleges, a corrupt Indian cricket and political establishment. His main contention, which is too libellous to report in detail, is that his main enemies in these realms, who include several of the current rulers of Indian cricket, a BJP minister and a media baron, are part of a grand conspiracy to run the game on behalf of the mob.

Suddenly grabbing my pad, Lalit Modi writes down their names, in rounded letters, and heavily underlines them. “It is all a nexus, and who is controlling that nexus? The mafia. So the whole thing [cricket, he means] is controlled by the mafia.”

“It’s not new mafia. It’s old mafia,” he says firmly. “Mafia tasted blood with something called betting. Which never used to be so big. It was very small, but now it’s gone to $2 billion a game approximately. So all their other nefarious activities they stopped, because this was the best business of all. And who was standing in their way? One commissioner [Lalit Modi himself, he means]. Every time I reprimanded a player, I used to get calls, and I didn’t give a damn. Every time I threw an agent out, I got a call. I kept on taking everyone out, where the mafia came to the point where they said, ‘This guy is becoming a thorn in our business’, and they tried to take me out. I escaped four times. Now, my simple question as a layman is: ‘How come I went out, and someone else came in, and the mafia are not trying to take him out?’ I pointed this out in 2010,and everyone said, ‘You are talking bullshit, crap, there’s no mafia after him, it’s called imagination.’ Then what happens? Guru comes along.”

Indeed he did—and this, sad to relate, points to the very big problem for cricket, and India, that Lalit Modi, raving in his billionaire-appointed exile, represents. Most of the odious corruption and conflicts of interest that have riven Indian cricket, as the Supreme Court has confirmed, including the gambling of Gurunath Meiyappan, son-in- law of the BCCI’s former supremo N Srinivasan, had nothing to do with Lalit Modi. Indeed, vainglorious, easily ridiculed and compromised as he is, he was for a long time a rare voice denouncing them.

Here is the great multi-layered, Elizabethan drama of Indian cricket. Sprung from the same corrupt soil, its several plot-lines, including Lalit Modi’s own saga, often provide a tragic-comic commentary on each other. Thus, the main act, played out at the BCCI, is an unending tragedy of hubris, plotting, civil strife and dead bodies piling up on the stage. IS Bindra and Jagmohan Dalmiya scheme together, and fall out; Dalmiya and Sharad Pawar start a war, which Pawar wins at the second attempt, leading to Dalmiya’s disgrace and exile; N Srinivasan unseats Lalit Modi, and is himself disgraced; Dalmiya—as the tragedy dips briefly to farce—returns.

In the heavens of the Indian Supreme Court, meanwhile, the gods, or rather the higher judiciary that is their emissary in modern India, stir to action. On 14 July, the Justice Lodha Committee meted out two-year bans for the Chennai Super Kings and the similarly scandal-prone Rajasthan Royals. For cricket’s well-wishers, this was the most hopeful development in Indian, and world, cricket administration since… well, ever. The financial cost to the teams affected is vast, as it is to the IPL’s reputation. Yet, for the first time, in hopeful consequence, a limit has been set to the vast impunity Indian cricket tsars enjoy. And with that, in turn, comes a promise, again for the first time, of serious anti-gambling and other anti-corruption measures. The Committee’s report called for cricket’s ‘purity’, ‘image’ and ‘trust’ to be reasserted. Its actions suggest this may for once amount to more than lip-service. Yet anyone who trusts that the judges can clean the Augean stables of the Indian game at this first attempt had better reflect on a third level of the cricket drama, represented by Lalit Modi, the Armani-clad, Shakespearean fool. Because in his self-interested shouting is too much that is unsettlingly true, and more that might yet prove to be.

The fact is that Lalit Modi, not alone, but uniquely loudly, predicted many of the governance problems that emerged on Srinivasan’s watch. And when he, having nothing to gain from keeping quiet, rails against the corruption that he claims is endemic in India’s state cricket associations now, he is probably at least half-right again. “You look at the BCCI accounts and they will be clean. You go one step below, that’s where lies the truth. You go to the second level, the state associations, these mom-and-pop shops there. There are three or four that are completely clean. But the rest are completely off the scale. That’s where you find the siphoning off. I’m talking about hundreds of crores a year, because the BCCI passes on everything in subsidy to these associations.” As a former member of the BCCI finance committee, Lalit Modi is unusually well-placed to know it; perhaps, at least to some degree, it is true.

“Media says it’s hogwash!” he says of this and his other spicy allegations, working himself into a lather of self-righteous indignation, as he puffs on one of his customised cigarettes (stamped ‘2008 IPL founder’ below the filter). “Well, if it is hogwash, fine, but it is all going to bite them. In three-four years, you will see. You will all find out the truth.”

About The Author

James Astill

James Astill is a senior editor at The Economist. He has previously headed the magazine’s bureaus in Washington and New Delhi. He is a contributor to Open

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