New Delhi: According to a report in the Times of India, Lalit Modi was in touch with former BCCI president Shashank Manohar even after he fled the country in 2010.

The former IPL czar retained contact with key people through his lawyers with regards to a possible probe against his bete noir N Srinivasan and his son-in-law Gurunath Meiyappan.

Modi sent a mail to Manohar on June 20, 2013 – a time when the IPL spot-fixing case was prime time news.

“FYI. Thought you should know . Updated sahib today and yesterday in London too. In my view pressure should be put to scrap Rajasthan Royals and CSK. There deposit and bg encased (sic) should be blacklisted and teams should be freshly auctioned to new owners. This should be without compromise...”

At the time, the Indian board had appointed a two-member panel led by Justice Chowta to probe allegations against Gurunath and CSK.

The TOI report suggests “Sahib” could well mean NCP chief Sharad Pawar.

Manohar mailed Modi on April 16, 2014 a letter that questioned BCCI's stance in the Supreme Court on the IPL scandal. Modi then forwarded the letter to his lawyer Swadeep Hora and power of attorney Mehmood Abdi.

“Get done ASAP...get rca to do now,” he wrote.

Rajasthan Cricket Association's KK Sharma then sent out a mail to then acting BCCI president Shivlal Yadav on the RCA letterhead, reproducing the instructions of Manohar and Modi.

“I am not in any kind of correspondence with Lalit Modi. I don't know anything about his whereabouts and what he is up to. I am no longer involved in day-to-day affairs of BCCI, so there is absolutely no question of him influencing me.

“You should understand that I do not know how to operate computers. So I have no idea what mails you are talking about and who is talking to Modi from that id,'' Manohar told TOI.

“This is hard to believe. Manohar has been the moral voice of the BCCI and many board members have looked up to him. But now if it's proved that Manohar was in correspondence with Modi at a time when he was talking in public about initiating clean-up operations in the board, it will be quite a blow for everybody concerned. Now, if this is true, we might be ed to believe that the instruction is actually coming from Modi,” a senior BCCI office-bearer told TOI with regards to these new revelations.