Cricket's biggest and richest star Sachin Tendulkar is padding up for a new battle, this time outside the cricket pitch. Aided by a team consisting of brother Ajit, wife Anjali and a battery of legal personnel, he faces his former tax adviser, Mumbai-based Madhav S. Bhatkhande, and his firm MSB & Co. The new series is being played in three different battlefields.

The current innings is on at the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India (ICAI), where Tendulkar had filed a complaint against Bhatkhande in August 1999. Tendulkar had also lodged a separate plea before the National Consumer Redressal of Disputes Commission (NCRDC) in December 1999 for the refund of a loan he gave Bhatkhande and sought punitive damages.

The legal battle was initiated in May 1999 when MSB & Co-which handled Tendulkar's tax account from 1989 to 1997-moved the Bombay High Court claiming that the cricketer owed it Rs 15.5 lakh in unpaid bills, peanuts compared to the crores of rupees Tendulkar makes each year.

For six years MSB & Co had advised Tendulkar on his commercial ventures, vetted endorsement proposals and negotiated with advertisers. Relations soured around 1995 when Tendulkar was in very high demand for endorsements for the World Cup 1996. The CA firm says it helped finalise Tendulkar's contracts with Philips and MRF as well as the Rs 100-crore deal with WorldTel's Main Stream Holdings during a 15-month period extending till March 1996. Legal notices issued to Tendulkar indicate that the firm had fixed a fee of Rs 42.5 lakh for consultancy and drafting work but no bill was issued. Instead, Tendulkar gave a loan of Rs 27 lakh in February 1996 to Bhatkhande's wife and an associate Sirish Sohni. He paid another Rs 5 lakh in June 1996 while the CA firm repaid Rs 5 lakh of the loan amount. The consultancy contract with the firm was terminated in March 1997. A final bill for Rs 42.5 lakh, however, remained unsettled. After several reminders and failed meetings to settle the balance of Rs 15.5 lakh, MSB & Co filed a suit to recover its fees.

Tendulkar retaliated by approaching the ICAI and charging Bhatkhande with "unprofessional conduct". In a seven-page complaint, he alleged that he had given Rs 27 lakh as a loan to bail out the CA who was in dire straits. On the WorldTel contract, the cricketer held that Bhatkhande worked for just three months against his claim of 15 months and that he raised a huge bill of Rs 42.5 lakh to get out of the liability of repaying the remaining loan of Rs 22 lakh. Bhatkhande, on his part, argues that if there were unpaid loans against his name, Tendulkar would not have paid him Rs 5 lakh after the dispute began. Most of the drafting work was done by a solicitor, Vivek Shirolkar, appointed by MSB & Co. He was paid Rs 1.5 lakh separately.

In his complaint to the ncrdc, Tendulkar sought the remaining Rs 22 lakh of the loan amount with 24 per cent interest per annum and demanded that the firm raise "realistic bills". He also sought punitive damages of Rs 5 lakh from the CA. "Sachin feels a sense of betrayal," says Tendulkar's lawyer Haresh Jagtiani. "The fight is not for money but for principles."

In July 1997, Bhatkhande and Tendulkar had approached G.G. Desai, a partner in the solicitor's firm Little & Co, to arbitrate in the matter. Desai said the bills were "reasonable" considering that the CA had spent close to 1,700 hours doing Tendulkar's accounts. Interestingly, the bill includes consultation charges for advice on which computer to instal and what car to buy.

Conceding that the cricketer had had a long innings with the CA, Jagtiani says the Tendulkars feel there was a "misuse of a relationship" by Bhatkhande. The CA counters by saying, "We have done nothing wrong." The way the messy battle is shaping up, Tendulkar might prefer facing Brett Lee or Glenn McGrath.