IPL bidding to be held afresh

(Credit: IANS) The Indian Premier League (IPL) bids for the new two new franchises will be held afresh after two weeks as the bidders objected to some of the financial clauses which were not there at the time of the bidding for the first edition.

The new tenders, which were to be opened on Sunday, will now be floated on March 9 and will be opened March 21st without the clause requiring the bidder to have a net worth of $1 billion.

The new tender form will have two amended clauses -- one reducing the advance deposit from $100m to a $10m "performance guarantee", to be submitted 24 hours in advance of the bid being opened.

The second will now have the winning bids paying 10 percent of their bid to the IPL governing council within 48 hours as against the 100 percent within a minimum time frame. The minimum bid amount, however, remains $22 million. The existing tenders were not opened at the IPL governing council meeting in Mumbai and were returned to the bidders.

"The IPL governing council has cancelled the current tender process and will issue a new one with revised conditions this week," IPL commissioner Lait Modi said. "The new document will have some new conditions which the IPL governing council believes will benefit the IPL and Indian cricket in the long term."

The cities in the fray were Pune, Ahmedabad, Nagpur, Kanpur, Dharamsala, Vizag, Rajkot, Cuttack, Baroda, Kochi, Indore and Gwalior.

The base price for the bid is more than four times the value set in January 2008, when the original eight franchises were auctioned.