Exclusive: Foes for 17 years, Zee and BCCI to bury Indian cricket’s long standing hatchet | Cricket News – Times of India

MUMBAI: One of Indian cricket’s long-standing sagas, as old as perhaps the beginning of the rise of India’s financial power in the game globally, is coming to a happy end.
The Zee Group (Zee Entertainment Enterprises) – Zee Telefilms until 2013 when it demerged into three separate entities – is pulling out of all pending and dormant legal cases against the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) with immediate effect.
Friendships turn sour, enemies turn friends, but life goes on. These two bitter rivals first landed in the Madras High Court in 2005 when Zee served the Indian cricket board with “a notice for causing the broadcast company losses” in excess of Rs 1600 crore.
Since then, the two entities got entangled in two more legal battles – in the Bombay High Court and eventually the Supreme Court of India – between 2005 and 2007 before getting at each other’s throats when Zee launched the now-extinct Indian Cricket League (ICL).
In between, there were criminal cases against each other too. The Zee Group first charged the BCCI, then led by former president Jagmohan Dalmiya, with issuing threats and Dalmiya, later, charged the Zee Group with similar allegations.
The battle with Zee and the launch of the ICL, in fact, forced the BCCI to take immediate action and launch the ‘official’ Indian Premier League (IPL) with immediate effect.
The rivalry did not just end here. The two parties continued to fight heightened legal battles and even got the Competitions Commission of India (CCI) to intervene.
However, the launch of IPL, the global participation, the public reception and the general popularity and sentiment eventually put paid to Zee’s battle plans.
“What’s gone under the bridge is now past. Everybody’s done with it. Individuals who fought those battles too have moved on, in different ways of course. It’s time for a new beginning,” sources tracking developments told TOI.
This ‘new beginning’ doesn’t just have to do with the fact that almost all those legal cases – pending or otherwise, and irrespective of who initiated it first – have no present-day locus standi. All those legal battles have either gone past their sell-by date or just don’t matter anymore.
Further, the ‘new beginning’ has more to do with BCCI coming out with a tender to invite bids for IPL media rights for the next five-year cycle and gearing up to bring out a tender later this year for Indian cricket’s bilateral rights.
Zee has bought the Invitation-To-Tender for the IPL rights and is currently learnt to be “studying the bid document closely”. There was heavy speculation after the BCCI came out with the IPL tender document if Zee could bid for the same given the pending legal cases.
It is learnt that there was no “understanding” of any sort between Zee and BCCI to bury this hatchet and Zee, wary of the fact that it was blacklisted by the board in the past (which ended a couple of years ago), did not want to take any risks ahead of the e-auction for rights and “wants things to begin on a fresh note”, say those in the know.
“This is Zee’s initiative and the BCCI, we believe, is welcoming the move,” sources add.
The company, led by former Zee boss Subhash Chandra’s son Punit Goenka, and Sony Pictures Network (SPN) are also in the middle of a merger, the process of which is likely to be completed by the end of June.
“So not just IPL but in general, it’s a fresh beginning for Zee on multiple fronts. And the BCCI too is happy to see the end of a chapter that doesn’t really mean anything after all these years,” say those tracking these developments.