In a recent television interview in which he said that all controversy would be, "swatted away" and an Indian cabinet minister was, "no problem for us", Lalit Modi saved his best words for last. "This (the IPL) is the world's only Indian brand."

Oh, woe is us.

If that is the really the case - and you believe centuries of yoga and gazillion terabytes of software programming never existed - then withdraw these goods from the market and let's at least produce a decent biscuit.

Because this version of The World's Only Indian Brand is currently being taken apart. It's most lingering - and unsellable - quality these days is financial fraud and money laundering.

Everyman India will still switch on its TV, see if the sixes are still heading for the stands and go about normal life.

It is IPL India that is in shock. That includes not just everyone with a stake in the event itself, but everyone who believed that the IPL was living proof of new India's entrepreneurial muscle. What they are witness to instead is the power of its state.

Estimates say that there may be as many as a thousand investigators entering into offices and homes of everyone connected to the IPL network. Or rather, make that its Matrix, in which Modi has been the One.

He was the IPL's creator, impressario, accountant, architect, marketing man. He was endorsed by the leading lights of cricket, lauded by buinsess, feted by financial experts and pursued relentlessly by Bollywood and anyone with anything to sell. An ex-Indian cricketer once joked that Modi spoke in a language called Dollars - "only millions and billions, of course".

Those numbers should have been an alert, but to cricket and the corporates, Indian and international, it only acted like an invitation into a select club. It was as if Allen Stanford - once owner of most of Antigua and now Texas jailbird - had not blazed through cricket like an emergency flare.

The official IPL power structure was blinded by the light. On Thursday evening, former India captain Mansur Ali Khan Pataudi, a member of the IPL Governing Council whom Modi is battling against, confessed to the council's errors on Indian televison saying, "As long as the product looked good, I was happy with it".

Those part of this "good" product - cricketers and commentariat - offered nothing other than devotional diarrhoea because it was part of their contract and their cheques did not bounce.

Those on the outside of this charmed inner circle of "celebrity" loved the spectacle and longed to belong. Modi tapped into the pulse of such aspiration, this season introducing the post-match ‘after-party', selling its TV rights and then regularly airing after-party footage on MTV India.

Those taking the IPL to the rest of the world made the product work for them as well. Mainstream broadsheets lavished logo-ridden pages of a number matched by a cricket World Cup or an Olympics with TV channels slotting daily half-hourly shows that ran every few hours.

Lalit Modi's IPL cricketing eco-system had a dazzling landscape. Covered by a virtual rainforest of promised "revenues", the sport was lively and the tourists could only gasp.

Through it all, the IPL was sustained by a single global brand which formed the oxygen its eco-system survived on. It's called greed.