Law ministry decision on report in two days

Onkar Singh

Minister of State for law and justice Arun Jaitley said his ministry will take a decision on the match-fixing report in next two days.

Speaking to rediff.com, Jaitley said his ministry is already in the process of assessing the evidence made available by the CBI in its report, against five cricket players and two others.

"Give me two more days, I will come back to you on this," Jaitley promised.

Ministry sources denied it is planning to recommend sending those named in the report to jail under the National Security Act.

"This is all rumour that we have recommended something of this sort. It is not true. We are still going through the report and it is for the minister to say what action to take. We will send the report the ministry of sports," said a senior official of the ministry of law and justice.

A cabinet reshuffle and probable change in the portfolio of sports minister Dhindsa has dampened the spirits of CBI officials, who had taken great pains to put together the entire report because of the enthusiasm shown by Sukhdev Singh Dhindsa.

"We do not know what interest the new sports minister will take in this matter, if there is a change in the portfolio," said a senior official of the CBI.

When asked if a change of guard in the sports ministry would make a difference to his assessment of the CBI report, K Madhavan, commissioner of the Board of Control for Cricket in India, said as far he is concerned it would not make any difference.

"I am going ahead with my work. I am planning to call the players sometime this week," Madhvan said on Tuesday morning.

Meanwhile, CBI spokesman S M Khan was busy denying allegations of groundsman Ram Adhar alias Chaudhary, that sleuths of the agency had beaten him up so badly that he even lost a tooth and had no option but to tell senior officers that he took Rs 50,000 from Ajay Sharma for doctoring the pitch.

"If the investigators had beaten up Ram Adhar so badly that he lost a tooth, he should have said so on August 6 itself instead of saying all this now. We would have got him medically examined. Nobody was touched during the course of the interrogation in the match-fixing case. And he was not even under investigation," Khan said.

Talking about the actual investigation, a senior official said it was not easy investigating the scandal. "We had no clue when we started investigating. We had to first catch hold off some of the bookies. They told us who are involved in the match-fixing case. We took down their addresses. But raids did not yield anything. Then there was the need to get the telephone numbers of the bookies and the players. It took time to get the whole thing.

"Then we started getting the print-outs of the all the telephone numbers and details of the air travel of the Indian team to various venues, their stay in hotels and other related things. But this was also not enough. We had to verify each and every statement made by the bookies before we got hold of the players and cross checked the statements of the bookies.

"Then came the claims of Prabhakar and the video tapes. Player after player denied Prabhakar's story that Kapil Dev had offered him money to under perform in a match against Pakistan in the Singer Cup tournament in 1994. We asked Kapil if he would take a lie detector test. He said he would. We asked Prabhakar to take a lie detector test, he backed out. Azhar admitted fixing three matches along with Mongia and Jadeja," said an officer of the agency.

The CBI is now busy collecting and verifying claims made by Jadeja and Mongia that they were not involved in match-fixing.

"We have to send the material to K Madhavan for his assessment. We have a case against the players named in the report. We are not averse to getting more information from any other source and we have kept options open even against Kapil Dev," he said.

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Mail Cricket Editor