Praful’s daughter Poorna Patel still a part of IPL 4

I was rather surprised to see Poorna Patel, the daughter of Civil Aviation Minister, Praful Patel at the IPL 4 Auctions in Bengaluru. The tall and sexy Poorna seems to have lost some weight. She, IPL’s Hospitality Manager appeared on the stage to handover winning bids to the celebrity auctioneer.

After all that brouhaha about a Delhi to Coimbatore Air India flight, IC 7603, scheduled to leave at 5.20 am on April 20, 2010 was aborted less than 12 hours before its departure to allow the aircraft to be deployed as a chartered flight for ferrying civil aviation minister Praful Patel’s daughter, Poorna Patel, and some IPL players from Chandigarh to Chennai, I presumed Paful would advise Poorna to quit IPL. Vijay Mallya’s daughter too worked closely with Lalit Modi for IPL but quit it post the ModiGate hit IPL. Praful Patel being a minister in the Cabinet, I thought he would ask Poorna to stay away from controversies.

Diverting an aircraft from a scheduled passenger flight for charter operations is forbidden under the law if the airline does not have another aircraft to operate the said passenger flight at the scheduled time. Yet the Bombardier CRJ 700 aircraft was pulled out of its scheduled flight allegedly on the demand of Poorna, the IPL’s hospitality manager. The aircraft (registration number VT-RJB), belonging to Alliance Air, was scheduled to fly the three-hour Delhi-Coimbatore route and return to the capital after leaving Coimbatore at 8.55am the same day. “But Poorna Patel called the airline on Monday evening (19th April 2010) and asked for an aircraft to do a chartered flight to Chennai from Chandigarh. So the aircraft was pulled out of the fleet. IPL paid for the chartered flight but the violation here was getting an aircraft scheduled for a passenger flight pulled out at the last moment for a chartered flight,” said an Air India official then. 

Guess in India the powerful can get away with anything!