Questions about her role in the Kochi franchise for the Indian Premier League have set off a titanic controversy.
Sunanda Pushkar hit the headlines because of her friendship with a minister — and she clearly did not enjoy the attention. Her stint under the spotlight was courtesy a man who certainly relished the glamour and the too-brightly lit stage of the Indian Premier League (IPL). Ironically, it is Lalit Modi who is now feeling the heat of his own revelations about her.
Pushkar graduated from backstage to front-stage when IPL Chairman and Commissioner Modi decided to reveal the names of the stakeholders in the League’s new Kochi franchise, hinting at shady dealings. In a Twitter message on April 11, Modi said, “I was told not to get into who owns Rendezvous, especially Sunanda Pushkar. Why?”
It was this message on the social networking site that convulsed the media, since it involved the country’s hottest sporting property and one of its most controversial ministers, Shashi Tharoor, Pushkar’s close friend. And now, as a fallout of that contretemps, Modi finds himself under the harsh glare of public scrutiny, facing allegations of tax evasion and fraud.
In the week that followed Modi’s tweet, the media went on the front foot to discover Pushkar’s antecedents and the mystery of the Kochi franchise. The investigations did not prove hugely informative — but they certainly raised many more questions. It was discovered that Pushkar, who is in her 40s, runs a spa in Dubai. The daughter of a Lieutenant Colonel, Pushkar comes from Sopore in the Kashmir valley. She holds an executive’s post with an infrastructure company owned by the Emirates government and has worked with advertising firms, a travel agency in Dubai as well as with an IT firm in Toronto.
Why should someone with fairly ordinary credentials receive 25 per cent equity free in the Kochi franchise? The charge was that her friendship with Tharoor earned her such a generous stake and that the junior foreign minister was the ultimate beneficiary.
Modi also made it public that the new IPL Kochi had seven owners of which some, including Pushkar, had received free equity. Modi had tweeted that the ownership was divided amongst Rendezvous Sports World (25 per cent, free), Rendezvous Sports World (1 per cent, bought), Anchor (27), Parinee (26), Film Waves (12), Anand Shyam (8) and Vivek Venugopal (1).
Much mud-slinging ensued via the TV channels and inside Parliament. Pushkar made it known that she was appalled by it all. She declined all media interviews — though she is not averse to being photographed — communicating only through strongly-worded media statements. In them, she accused the media of ignoring her professional background and international business experience and focusing “obsessively on my personal life as if a woman cannot be capable of professional or financial success”.
Her statement said: “My own business interests and assets are substantial, and efforts to besmirch Tharoor by presenting me as a proxy for him are personally insulting for me as a woman and as a friend. I have built up a respectable and successful career while coping with widowhood and raising a child as a single mother. Yet I have been reduced to a caricature in the media, portrayed with inaccuracies and falsehoods.”
On her connection with Rendezvous, she said the company had invited her to associate herself with them “as a consultant in their various sporting activities and particularly in their potential bid to acquire the franchise of an IPL team.”
This was not the first approach either. “I had previously been approached by Karim Morani of Kolkata Knight Riders to join them in a similar capacity and had regretted that the timing was not convenient for me,” she added.
What exactly would she do for Rendezvous? “In view of my extensive international experience as a business executive, marketing manager and entrepreneur, I was invited to assist Rendezvous particularly in the areas of fund-raising, networking, elsewhere; event management; and brand building.”
And why the sweat equity? “Because this is a start-up effort, I was told that in lieu of a salary they would grant me minor equity in Rendezvous in return for my efforts — which is a common practice across the world for start-ups and projects of this nature. I should stress that I have accepted no salary or expenses and am conscious that the equity remains only on paper for the foreseeable future. However, with the equity comes an opportunity to participate in the management and promotion of Rendezvous and in particular of its IPL team, a challenge I welcome.”
None of this staunched the speculation about her relationship with Tharoor and the controversy eventually cost him his ministership and her sweat equity. And to the rumours of whether she is engaged to marry Tharoor, came her blunt reply: “My personal life is nobody else’s business and if I have a marriage to announce, I will do it myself, rather than leave it to strangers. I would request the media to respect my privacy.”
Given the controversy in which he finds himself, Lalit Modi must be wishing he’d done just that.
