Sundar Raman

Sundar Raman began his professional career in 1995 as a media planner with the erstwhile Hindustan Thompson Associates now J. Walter Thompson. Raman eventually took over as the managing director of Mindshare India, a division of ad group WPP's media agency Group M.^[1] In January 2008, Raman delivered a presentation to Lalit Modi, the then Vice President of the BCCI, which eventually led to him being hired by Modi to help him conduct the inaugural edition of the IPL. In February 2008, Raman was officially appointed as IPL COO after a decade in strategic media thinking business working for brands such as Unilever, PepsiCo, Motorola, Samsung and Amex.^[5] Along with Modi, Raman was instrumental in shifting the entire IPL T20 cricket tournament to South Africa in 2009. Raman resigned from the post of COO of IPL on 3 November 2015. Shortly afterwards he was appointed as the CEO of Reliance Sport which is part of Reliance Industries Limited.^[6][7] He also owns a 12,5%^[8] stake in the increasingly successful SA20, a franchise T20 tournament played annually in South Africa.

Raman was at the helm of affairs when the IPL betting and spot-fixing scandal was unearthed in 2013 involving some cricketers, Chennai Super Kings Team Principal and BCCI President, N Srinivasan's son-in-law, Gurunath Meiyappan, Vindu Dara Singh and a few other individuals.^[9] Raman maintained the stand that Meiyappan was not a team official during the ensuing investigation conducted by former Chief Justice Mukul Mudgal. But his contention was thereafter rejected by the report filed by the Mudgal committee.^[10]

In early April 2014, the court-ordered interim BCCI President for all IPL-related matters, Sunil Gavaskar revealed that he is evaluating Raman's role in the IPL scandal.^[11][12]