No non-compliance issues against IPL teams so far

India's Corporate Affairs minister Salman Khurshid has said the government has so far not uncovered any "serious" non-compliance issues the IPL franchises may have allegedly committed under the Companies Act 1956.

"I have no reports from the Registrar of Companies and I don't think there is anything serious on the compliance issue. If there was something serious, then I would have been the first person to know it," Khurshid told the Financial Express.

However, the Registrar of Companies is yet to submit its final report on the matter, so Khurshid could not definitively rule out any violations. The ministry is also waiting for the enforcement directorate's report on the IPL, though that investigation has a limited mandate, according to Khurshid.

The minister also said that if there turned out to be minor infractions of the Companies Act that did not amount to criminal offences, then the errant teams would be given the opportunity to correct those mistakes.

Khurshid's comments are in contrast to statements made by the chairman of the parliamentary standing committee on finance, Yashwant Sinha, who said the teams were guilty of violating the Companies Act. The committee recently questioned senior bureaucrats over the delay in the investigation of the source of funds for IPL teams, with Sinha asking why "the agencies [had] failed to gather information on the source of funds used for bidding for franchises."

The government began investigating the IPL after its suspended chairman Lalit Modi questioned the shareholding pattern of the Kochi franchise on Twitter. The ensuing furore led to the resignation of Shashi Tharoor as minister of state for External Affairs and the suspension of Modi from the BCCI. Since then the corporate affairs ministry has been gathering details from IPL team owners about their ownership structure and funding arrangements.