The irrepressible Lalit Modi was at it again, this time at the Google Zeitgeist 2010 Conference in London, where he was part of a three-person panel during the Trailblazers session. The session was led by BBC Radio 4 presenter Evan Davis, who pointedly asked the suspended IPL chairman if he was guilty of the charges levelled against him. “No,” said Modi in a rare public appearance, before launching into an impassioned defence that suggested jealousy was the raison d’être for the charges.

“I guess I became the focus of so many charges because we got 149 million viewers to watch the IPL final. Everybody wondered how we got there. We grew too fast. We blew every number on the table; we blew everything that anybody said that can't be done. We surpassed every plan that we put on the table. We p****d off a lot of people."

Unfortunately, that was the only question thrown at Modi about the allegations he faces, reports India Today. The theme of the session was the rapid success of the IPL, not its troubles, and so the rest of the conversation turned to the move to South Africa in 2009 and how the rest was history.