Cricket Association of Bengal turned priced tickets into free passes

KOLKATA: The Cricket Association of Bengal (CAB) is in turmoil ever since its finance committee reported an excess of expenditure over income for the fiscal year ending March 31, 2015, on Thursday.
The Rs 3.7 crore revenue deficit has raised all sorts of questions and indications are that Wednesday’s working committee meeting will be a stormy one with members seeking explanation from CAB office-bearers about the association’s spiralling expenditure.
What is more shocking is that in a year (2014-15) when the CAB experienced a funds crunch, the association forfeited revenue worth at least Rs 57 lakh by choosing to convert approximately 8,000 priced tickets for the November 13 ODI versus Sri Lanka last year into complimentaries.
Members are aghast that such a decision was taken unilaterally by a top office-bearer, who didn’t even bother to get it approved by the working committee — a requirement under CAB’s rules and regulations.
Even more disturbing is the fact that the decision to convert around 8,000 tickets — of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 denominations — into complimentaries was ratified vide a memo issued by CAB joint-secretary Subir ‘Bablu’ Ganguly in February this year, more than three months after the match.
The memo seems to have been generated belatedly to meet auditing norms as it would have been hard to explain the loss of revenue in the balance sheet.
It may be argued that the demand for tickets for the ODI against Lanka was low and hence there was a possibility of a bulk of them remaining unsold, but the lack of transparency and the haste behind the move to convert them into complimentaries, smacks of a scam. Members are keen to know how CAB benefitted from this move and who were the recipients of these complimentary tickets.
CAB officials, including treasurer Biswarup Dey and Sourav Ganguly, the other joint-secretary, too will have a lot to explain with regard to other expenses under their respective domains.