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New Delhi: Pune and Rajkot will be home to two new franchises in the Indian Premier League for the next two years, BCCI announced on Tuesday.
The new teams will fill the void left by the two-year suspension of the Chennai Super Kings and Rajasthan Royals franchises following an illegal betting scandal in the cash-rich Twenty20 tournament.
New Rising, a consortium led by Sanjiv Goenka, chairman of the RP-Sanjiv Goenka Group, bagged the Pune team while mobile manufacturers Intex made a successful bid for Rajkot in a reverse bidding process.
Under reverse bidding, investors were asked to bid lower than the base price of 400 million rupees (about $6 million), the maximum amount the BCCI offered to pay from the IPL central revenue pool to the new owner.
Having bid in the negative, New Rising will pay 160 million rupees while Intex will shell out 100 million rupees for their respective teams, the BCCI said.
The Twenty20 league, with a $3.5 billion estimated brand value and boasting of Bollywood stars and major conglomerates as investors, has been dogged by corruption allegations for years.
The auction followed the decision by India's cricket board to ban the Chennai Super Kings and the Rajasthan Royals from the glitzy tournament on the recommendation of a Supreme Court-appointed panel.
The 2013 IPL season was mired in controversy after police launched legal proceedings against several officials from the two teams and three Rajasthan Royals players for illegal betting and spot-fixing.
The Twenty20 tournament's chairman Rajiv Shukla said that New Rising, a subsidiary of the Sanjeev Goenka group, bagged the Pune franchise, while Delhi-based Intex Mobiles picked up the Rajkot team in open bidding.
Shukla said the owners had not paid the tournament organisers for the right to field teams in the next two editions of the tournament, but would instead forgo payments from a central pool of money which is made of cash from TV rights and sponsorship.
