Chennai, March 20: The suspense over the two new IPL teams, who will join the cash-awash event from 2011 season, is expected to end tomorrow when bids from the proposed buyers open here at an auction. This will be the second attempt to find new teams as the March 7 auction had to be cancelled when the proposed buyers objected to bidding guidelines.
Earlier, Groups with a net worth of USD 1 billion were allowed to be part of the process and that too with a bank guarantee of USD 100 million. But now as per the relaxed conditions, the buyers are to choose from eight cities — Pune, Ahmedabad, Kanpur, Nagpur, Indore, Cuttack, Gwalior and Visakhapatnam — with an advance deposit of USD 10 million.
The base price for each new franchise would be USD 225 million. The BCCI sources said 13 companies had bought the bid document and five bids were received by the cut-off time which ended yesterday evening.
—-PTI–