In a dramatic turnaround of events, Delhi police on Thursday said Raj Kundra, husband of Bollywood superstar Shilpa Shetty and the co-owner of Indian Premier League (IPL) Rajasthan Royals, has admitted his involvement in gambling in the multi-million dollar Twenty20 league, reports NDTV.
Rajasthan Royals is currently at the centre of a massive spot-fixing and gambling scandal as three cricketers from the Royals including S Sreesanth were arrested last month on charges that they took money from bookies to concede a pre-determined number of runs in the recently-concluded edition of the IPL. The players, however, have denied the allegations.
“He [Kundra] has admitted to betting and has said that he placed bets on his own team through bookies. He also said that he lost a huge amount of money in betting,” Delhi Police commissioner Neeraj Kumar told reporters. Kundra was interrogated all day Wednesday.
According to police sources, Kundra told police interrogators that he placed bets on the IPL “for the last two-three years.”
Betting on all sports except horse-racing is illegal in India. The penalty for betting, according to rules laid down by the Board of Control for Cricket India, is suspension for up to two to five years. Spot-fixing, in which a specific part of the match but not the outcome is fixed, is illegal.
The police is unlikely to detain Kundra for gambling, which is a bailable offence. However, Kundra was made to hand over his passport to the Delhi police in order to prevent him from leaving the country.
The law enforcement agency has said it wants to focus on establishing links between bookies and the Indian underworld don Dawood Ibrahim’s crime syndicate.
The Royals have four owners including Shilpa Shetty.
A player from the team, Siddharth Trivedi, who has turned approver in the case, has allegedly told the police that before an IPL match in Ahmedabad, he was approached by a business partner of Kundra, Umesh Goenka, who asked him about the pitch and which cricketers would play for the Royals that day.
Police want to know if Kundra was aware of this incident, and of the reported links between bookies and some of his team members.