New Delhi: The Supreme Court today reserved its order on the maintainability of Zee TV's writ petition challenging the BCCI's action of cancelling the tender process for allotment of telecast rights of cricket matches played in India after awarding the contract to it.

However, it declined to intervene in the Cricket Board's decision to give telecast rights to Prasar Bharti and SET Satellite (Singapore) Pvt Ltd for the Australia and South Africa Tests.

After a marathon five-day argument over the maintainability issue, a five-judge constitution Bench comprising Justice N Santosh Hegde, Justice S N Variava, Justice B P Singh, Justice H K Sema and Justice S B Sinha reserved the verdict but asked all parties to file their written submissions by Monday.

At the beginning of the hearing Zee raised the issue of the "arbitrary" manner in which the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) has awarded the telecast rights for the India-Australia and India-South Africa matches to Prasar Bharati and SET Satellite (Singapore) Ltd for telecast in India and abroad.

It said that it was ready to pay more than what the two channels were paying to BCCI as revenue. However, when the Bench said that nothing "positive" could be done about it before the question of maintainability was decided, Zee's counsel Harish Salve said that the parties having telecast rights for these two series should be asked to maintain records about the revenue receipts.

The Bench ordered both Prasar Bharati and the Singapore company as well as BCCI to maintain records of the accounts till further orders.

On the question of maintainability, BCCI counsel K K Venugopal submitted that the Board was in no way connected to the Government and the Government did not exercise control over it in any manner.

"For this reason, BCCI cannot be classified as 'State' within the meaning of Article 12 of the Constitution and hence, a writ petition cannot be maintainable against it," he said.

However, the Union Government today filed an additional affidavit along with a host of correspondence between it and the cricket Board to drive home its point that the BCCI was dependant on it for several things and hence it could be classifed as 'state'.

This came as a major support to Zee TV.

Appearing for the Centre, Additional Solicitor General Mohan Parasaran referred to the affidavit which said "Government has de facto recognised and continues to only recognise BCCI as the apex national sports body for regulating the game of cricket in India.

"Because of this recognition granted to BCCI that the team selected by BCCI is able to represent itself as Indian Cricket team and if there is no recognition the team selected by BCCI cannot in any manner represent or call itself the Indian Cricket Team," the affidavit said.

Taking this as the cue, Salve cited several letters by BCCI to the Government seeking various kinds of permissions for hosting matches in India and sending the Indian team abroad. "If this is correct, then the BCCI could be rightly be accused of suppressing facts before the Court," he added.