A Special Court in Chennai acquitted senior IPS officer Sampath Kumar on Friday of all charges with regard to the 2013 Indian Premier League (IPL) betting scam. The court's ruling comes a year after the Tamil Nadu home department had reinstated the officer, after departmental inquiries dismissed charges of corruption against him.
Sampath Kumar was the superintendent of police (SP) of the Q branch of Tamil Nadu police, when he actually blew the whistle on the betting scam in 2013. His investigations had brought to the spotlight the alleged betting, fixing and cheating that came with the game. Big names were involved in the scam including - Gurunath Meiyappan, who was a former Chennai Super Kings (CSK) official and son-in-law of then BCCI president N Srinivasan. Even the then captain of CSK, MS Dhoni was insinuated by the media to have been in the know of the illegal activity. During a probe into this, the RM Lodha committee suspended India Cements and Jaipur IPL, the owners of the Chennai Super Kings and Rajasthan Royals teams. They were banned from taking part in the tournament for two years.
However, when the CB-CID took over the case they had alleged that during his tenure as investigating officer, Sampath Kumar had collected bribes from bookies to not reveal information on those involved.
The 1997-batch officer, based on a special report of the Crime Branch CID, allegedly received Rs. 60 lakh from the accused in the IPL cricket betting case and was therefore charged of violating Sub-Rule (1) of Rule 3 of the All India Services (Conduct) Rules, 1968 by failing to maintain absolute integrity.
He was then placed under suspension in 2014. This move came after he deposed before the Justice Mudgal Committee which was probing the issue. He had also alleged a cover-up by the CB-CID in the investigation.
Speaking to TNM in March 2018, days before he joined duty again, the officer had said, "I stand by everything that I had said in 2013 and demand that a special investigation team look into the scam."