Former India skipper Bishan Singh Bedi doubted the source of huge money being spent during the Indian Premier League (IPL) auction and alleged that the cash-rich tournament is a platform for “money laundering”.

The legendary spinner could not have timed his attack on IPL with millions spent on day one of the IPL 2018 auctions in Bengaluru. He said, “IPL is also responsible for bringing in somebody called Justice Lodha Commission. I have never known anything so cheap going so expensively. People have accused me that I am maligning IPL as I don’t get anything out of it. I said to see if you can rope me in, you can try.”

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Bedi further elaborated, “Can anyone justify one wicket’s price at Rs one crore and Rs 97 lakh for one run. I am not against the money part of it as players deserve to get more money playing for the country than playing for a wretched club. But do we know where all this money is coming from and where it is going? If this is not money laundering I don’t know what is.”

Pointing out the match-fixing scandal of 2013, Mr. Bishan said, “You find a person like Virat who has been retained by 17 crores… He deserves it. But in the same dressing room, there will be a youngster who will fetch Rs 10-15 lakh. Now he will try to catch up with Kohli. Now how does he do it? There are ways and means to do it and there is a platform which encourages you to do it which is match-fixing. IPL is an easy target.”

Bedi spoke highly of Nawab Pataudi and also named MS Dhoni as a gentleman on the field who “never swore”. He said, “My favorite cricketer was Pataudi. He was the greatest thing that has ever happened to Indian cricket. Besides Pataudi, the other gentleman was Dhoni who never swore on the cricket field.”

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He further added, “He (Pataudi) was my first captain and all credit to him as I learnt a lot from him. He was the first Indian captain to bring in a fair amount of Indianness in the dressing room. He always used to tell, we are not playing for Maharashtra or Delhi or Bengal. We are playing for India.”

In the same thread, Bishan also mentioned about Sourav Ganguly: “He is one of the finest Indian captains we have had and he was also responsible, in many ways, for the culture that prevails today. The golden period of Indian cricket was when Sourav Ganguly was captaining the side. He had at his disposal Sachin Tendulkar, Rahul Dravid and Laxman.”