This is the second part of a series on an external audit report that examines the books of the Delhi & District Cricket Association, between the years 2012 and 2015. The first part, on the report’s failure to mention Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, formerly the president of the DDCA, is here. The final part of the series, which discusses why, despite the audit’s findings and court orders, reform within the DDCA is a long way away, is here.

On 10 October, the Delhi & District Cricket Association (DDCA) submitted a special audit report of its accounts before the Delhi High Court. In January, the high court appointed the retired Supreme Court justice Vikramjit Sen as the administrator of the state-level cricketing body, and directed him to appoint an external auditor to examine association’s accounts. Sen engaged the firm GS Mathur & Company to audit the DDCA’s books for the financial years between 2012 and 2015.

The firm found numerous instances of financial and procedural malfeasance in the cricketing body’s functioning. The audit report explicitly names members of the DDCA’s executive body as being involved in these irregularities—prominent among these are SP Bansal and Anil Khanna. A former president and a former general secretary respectively, Bansal and Khanna were suspended from the DDCA in January 2015 on allegations of financial misconduct. In the first part of the series on the findings of this audit, I noted that the name of the finance minister, Arun Jaitley—who directly headed the DDCA for over half the time period between 2012 and 2015—was conspicuous by its absence from the report.

Though the audit covers a relatively short period of the cricketing body’s function, its findings are staggering. Among others, the report indicts the DDCA for: embezzlement in purchase of cricket-match tickets to the tune of Rs 231.82 lakh; withdrawing nearly Rs 18 lakh in the name of meetings for the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI), which was subsequently used for “fictitious payments”; granting unauthorised loans of over Rs 155 lakh in January 2014 to three private companies, at least one of which was linked to the then DDCA president Bansal; granting “undue favor” to select employees in the form of nearly Rs 45.25 lakh in seemingly unauthorised ex-gratia payments and bonuses; and the payments of Rs 7.70 lakh that “seems to be bogus” and “appears to be embezzled.” The sum of the financial irregularities listed in the report adds up to over Rs 14 crore.

In one of the findings in a section titled “Cash fraud / embezzlement,” the auditors note that between 30 April and 8 June 2012, a sum of Rs 44 lakh was withdrawn and “used for purchase of IPL tickets.” (It is unclear why the DDCA, which is supposed to receive complimentary tickets from ticket-vendors such as GMR, would need to purchase extra tickets.) “There is nothing on record to justify necessity of purchasing tickets in cash,” the audit report states. “The source from where the tickets purchased were also not available / on record.”