Mittal's $1.65bn cricket deal clears India, and South Africa's SA20 has a new majority owner

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One of the SA20's six franchises has a new majority shareholder. The Competition Commission of India signed off on 17 September on a cricket ownership change carrying an enterprise value of about $1.65 billion, bringing Paarl Royals into the group alongside teams in India and the Caribbean owned by Lakshmi and Aditya Mittal.

Filed on 30 July as case C-2026/07/1444, the combination drew a request for further information in August after the commission found the initial submission incomplete, and was cleared under Section 31 of the Competition Act.

None of their businesses compete in India

The buyers told the regulator that none of their businesses competed with the targets in any plausible Indian market. A detailed order is still to come. Approvals from the BCCI and the IPL Governing Council were the other conditions attached when the parties signed on 3 May, with completion targeted for the third quarter.

Ownership Structure

The ownership chain touches four jurisdictions and terminates nowhere near the Western Cape. Westview Cricket, a UK-registered vehicle for the Mittal family, takes roughly 75%. Poonawalla Sports and Fitness, owned outright by Serum Institute of India chief executive Adar Poonawalla, takes about 18%. Around 7% stays with the outgoing shareholders, Manoj Badale among them. The asset itself is EM Sporting Holdings, a Mauritius company sitting above Royal Multisport in India, Paarl Royals Limited in South Africa and Barbados Royals Limited in Barbados. On completion, Lakshmi Mittal, Aditya Mittal, Vanisha Mittal-Bhatia, Poonawalla and Badale are all expected to take seats on the Rajasthan board.

Emerging Media led the consortium that paid $67 million for the Jaipur licence at the IPL's founding auction in 2008, less than any of the other seven buyers put up. The team won that first season and has not won since. Eighteen years on, with South African and Caribbean franchises bolted to it, the group has been priced at close to twenty-five times the original outlay. An American consortium fronted by Kal Somani and backed by Rob Walton of the Walmart family and the Hamp family reached an agreed $1.63 billion in March before the deal died in due diligence. Mittal and Poonawalla were signed two months later at $1.65 billion.

September 2022 Auction

The SA20's six franchises were auctioned in September 2022 and every one went to an IPL owner. The league launched in January 2023 and has worked: a reliable January window, SuperSport carriage, crowds, a competitive product. What it has never had is a single rand of domestic equity.

Paarl Royals has now changed ownership as a line item inside a group valuation driven by IPL media economics, Indian regulatory clearance and a bidding contest between an Indian steel family and a Walmart heir. Nothing that happened in Paarl moved that number.

Revenue in South Africa

Cricket South Africa owns the league and takes its share of central revenue, and whatever a change of control triggers under the franchise agreements is not public. But the capital gain here belongs to Badale and his co-investors, not to the competition that made the Paarl asset worth owning. This is the structural trade African sports continues to make: import capital and expertise to get a property off the ground, then watch the equity appreciate offshore. Rugby's South African franchises and the continent's football clubs face milder versions of the same problem. SA20 is the purest case, a league with zero local ownership by design.

The fix is not to lock foreign money out, which would have left the SA20 unbuilt. It is to price the option at the front end: transfer levies on change of control, a retained league stake, or founder equity held by the federation that converts when franchises trade. Those terms are cheap to write in year zero and impossible to retrofit once a Mauritius holding company sits between the league and its owners.