MUMBAI: On the eve of the World Cup final, the International Cricket Council finds itself in a right royal pickle as there is currently no radio broadcast available for ICC’s blue riband event.
Reason according to Times of India: Dubai based Channel 2 Group Corporation, which won the digital radio rights until 2023 for all ICC events, has left the ICC in a financial quandary as cheques issued for the procurement of rights (bank guarantees) have bounced over the last couple of weeks.
Ajay Sethi, who owns Channel 2, has however placed the blame for the current crisis at the doors of India-based multi sports content app Sports Flashes, run by Raman Raheja, to whom the rights were sub-licensed. These companies were tasked with the job of producing the world feed but have effectively washed their hands off their respective responsibilities resorting instead to an ugly blame game.
“They made a huge fraud with us,” Sethi told TOI from London. “This is a serious default on their part. I am pursuing the matter.”
Raheja denies Sethi’s allegations. “He (Sethi) got in touch with us and said he has ICC audio rights. Since we had the wherewithal to carry out high quality production, he wanted to get into an arrangement with us. How he got those rights without past experience is still a surprise to us. Anyway, so we had this commitment, riding on which I put serious money on the table and got as many as 17 cricketers on board to carry out the production and audio broadcast. Given the space Sports Flashes enjoys in audio production, it soon became evident, this would be our show,” says Raheja.
It is here that the Sports Flashes owner alleges to TOI that Sethi could not digest the way things were being run. “He got edgy and started demanding money out of turn from us. He went back on the commitment. In fact, we sent our team to UK for production which he never allowed to enter and access stadium facilities,” Raheja claimed to the daily.
Discloure: The Times Group (which owns TOI) invested an undisclosed amount in Sports Flashes in August 2017 so is clearly an interested party to the dispute.
As stated by a Times Group spokesperson at the time the investment was made: “Sports Flashes is a unique platform as they engage the audience well with the international and regional content. Since this app caters to multi-sports categories and that too in multiple languages, we see it as a great platform for promoting Indian sports amongst the fans.”
