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Condon: we're closing in on match-fixing suspects
CricInfo - 8 August 2001

Lord Condon has revealed that his Anti-Corruption Unit is closing in on several suspects as his investigation into match-fixing continues.

Condon has been criticised for his apparent failure to bring anyone to justice. But speaking to the Daily Mail, Lord Condon insisted that his team has successfully foiled an attempt to fix the England v Pakistan series earlier in the British summer, and revealed that investigations were on-going into several other, as yet unnamed, individuals.

"We are still working on other cases that at present are not in the public domain," Condon said. "There are individuals who are in our sights and they are not in any way linked to names that came out in India's CBI report."

And far from undermining the credibility of the investigation, Condon believes that the exoneration of Mark Waugh, Martin Crowe, Arjuna Ranatunga, Alec Stewart and Aravinda de Silva (all implicated in India's CBI report) was the correct result for "natural justice."

"Much of the allegations were on one man's say-so, and natural justice suggests that the guys mentioned should not face disciplinary action unless Gupta was prepared to support his evidence," explained Lord Condon.

"That's why we gave him a deadline and I took the lead in telling him he had to put up or shut up. Inevitably, people want the drama of big names coming out but it is not that straightforward.

"I can understand that the public found the CBI report very newsworthy and would want more of that but it would be wrong to assume that all the work of the anti-corruption unit is about the kind of thing that came out of that."

And Condon pointed to the recent series between England and Pakistan as an example of the success that his team had had in ridding cricket of match-fixing.

"We are confident that most of the malpractice that has gone on in the past has now stopped," he claimed.

"One of the things we have done is to build up a lot of detailed intelligence and thanks to that we were able to frustrate what was a serious attempt to interfere with those matches.

"We had people working simultaneously in London and India and used surveillance. I am completely confident that the series was clean."

© CricInfo


Players/Umpires Alec Stewart, Mark Waugh, Arjuna Ranatunga, Martin Crowe, Aravinda De Silva.