Amitabh Chaudhary barred from conducting selection meeting

The BCCI selection committee meeting for the one-off Test against Bangladesh was delayed by four hours after joint secretary Amitabh Chaudhary was found ineligible to convene the meeting.

Even though, Amitabh Chaudhary was found ineligible to convene, he was allowed to attend the meeting.

The BCCI selection committee meeting for the one-off Test against Bangladesh was delayed by four hours after joint secretary Amitabh Chaudhary was found ineligible to convene the meeting.

The meeting was supposed to be held at 12 noon, but was delayed by four hours as Chaudhary, who was present at the five star facility, was not allowed as per chief of Committee of Administrators (CoA) Vinod Rai's instruction.

Around afternoon, Chaudhary was informed that he has to wait as he is eligible to attend the meeting. It was Rahul Johri, the CEO, who convened the meeting by video conferencing.

"Amitabh Chaudhary had called a senior selection committee meeting in Delhi today to select the squad against Bangladesh. Vinod Rai and Co have immediately swung in and barred him from doing anything. The CEO is directly convening the meeting via video conference from Mumbai," a BCCI source, who was witness to the full incident here, on Tuesday.

All was not well when the BCCI mandarins broke for lunch with one of the selectors — Sarandeep Singh — absent from the meeting.

Some of the waiting media members were told that meeting will start at 3 p.m. but then around 3:30 p.m. Sarandeep was seen entering the hotel and looked clueless about when the meeting will start.

Around 4 p.m., he went up and joined his colleagues as the meeting started.

Tuesday's incident proved that Chaudhary probably is not authorised to function as joint secretary and will go to Dubai as the BCCI representative only as he has a thorough background knowledge which investment banker Vikram Limaye will be needing for future meetings.