Title: Kochi and Pune added as two new franchises in the IPL

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After weeks of suspense, the two new IPL teams have been added to the Indian Premier League on Sunday. The two cities which will also play in the fourth edition of the tournament apart from the eight existing franchises are Kochi and Pune, bought over by the Rendezvous Group and the Sahara Group.

The closed bid process that happened in Chennai yesterday saw the bids opened by Lalit Modi, the chief of the IPL. The Sahara Group was the declared as the winner of the first team and they chose Pune over the other two cities that they had bid for – Nagpur and Ahmedabad. The bid amount was a whopping $370 million, something that was much higher than even what Lalit Modi had thought of.

The other city that won through was Kochi, for a sum of $333 million that was put up as a consortium called as the Rendezvous Sports Private Ltd. It was earlier said that Shashi Tharoor was one of those who had put in some money to buy the franchise, but Tharoor later denied it. He added that his only job had been to get the members in the consortium together and bid for the side.

It is a consortium with five partners and consists of the Rendezvous group, Parini developers, Anand Shah Estate, Anchor Earth Private Limited and Film Waves.

The home ground for Pune is getting constructed and should be done by the end of this year, whereas the IPL has promised an alternative location for the Kochi side if their stadium does not get constructed by the time the IPL is around the corner next year.

The member from the Rendezvous Group, Shailendra Gaikwad said, “We have closely been following every development within the IPL, right from the inaugural year. Today, I am very happy for our consortium of Rendezvous World Sport and the people of Kochi as we finally have a team to call our own in this amazing city-based sports franchise”. It is also been said that some of the members of the consortium are from abroad.

Modi later said that he was expecting the bid to be anywhere around the $300-310 million bracket. The base price of these bids was $225 million and there were worries that not too many would be interested in bidding such an amount. However, it was said that there were five entities which had put in bids which qualified for buying out the cities, including the ones by Videocon.

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