Sahara India on Saturday said that after a 11-year journey as cricket sponsors, it

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has decided to snap ties with the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) and withdraw from the Indian Premier League as the relationship between the two has become strained.

“We really feel such one-sided emotional relationship cannot be dragged any further. We are withdrawing from all cricket under BCCI,” said Sahara Group chief Subroto Roy at a press conference in Mumbai.

When contacted by Financial Chronicle, BCCI vice president Rajeev Shukla said the board has not received any formal letter from Sahara. "Any course of action will be taken once we received a letter from Sahara."

Roy alleged that there were many genuine things that his group had asked BCCI to pay heed to. "But they (BCCI) did not give any importance. They did not open the bid when Sahara submitted its bid for the first time. Rules were broken for other teams but we were not given natural justice," he said.

Roy said the group has approached BCCI to settle the issues through arbitration and it had even proposed an arbitrator, but the BCCI was not interested. "We even approached the BCCI for arbitration and even proposed the name of the arbitrator," said Roy.

He said considering the number of matches reduced from the originally-proposed 94, Pune Warriors paid 25 per cent more money to the BCCI for owning the franchise.

In the last 10 years, the group has spent around Rs 600-700 crore for the Indian team, said Roy.

Sahara Group said it has also withdrawn its sponsorship of the Indian cricket team and Pune warriors after the BCCI turned down the franchise’s request that the price of their player Yuvraj Singh be added to their overall purse for the auction.

Roy said he would not want to blame anybody but he was snapping ties with the BCCI and pulling out Pune Warriors from the IPL as it involved emotional issues.

"Again without blaming anybody, I thought it would give us a lot of happiness. It involved emotional issues. Let us put all this money in sports development in villages," said Roy.