The International Cricket Council's (ICC) anti-corruption unit (ACU) is hoping to publicly identify a corruption mastermind in New Delhi soon, based on pieces of evidence gathered from players and officials.
The ACU believes that most cricket corruption cases around the world can be linked back to 10 or 12 individuals working as bookies in India, according to a report in The Telegraph.
Once the unit identifies the fixer, the ICC will use article 2.4.9 of the code of conduct under which known corruptors will have their names and mugshots along with their aliases uploaded on the ICC's website. It will then become a punishable offence for any player or official covered by the ICC's code to associate with that individual.
"Most of these jobs will be started by 10 or 12 corruptors we know very well. Even though at the start of an investigation those people will not feature, and there will be a new person acting as an intermediary making approach to a player, when we dig into it we will find it is one of that group of corruptors using a different name or new phone," ACU general manager Alex Marshall told The Telegraph report.
"We will look to have that person named as an excluded person and then anyone in cricket who has had fair warning and associates with him will be in trouble. That is not the purpose of it but if we have a number of allegations identifying one person we will start the process of excluding them. We are doing the first one or two right now," he further said.
Fixers are now thinking imaginatively amid the Covid-19 pandemic. The pandemic has forced corruptors to think imaginatively, notably faking a tournament, the Uva T20 League, in Sri Lanka which was actually being held in Sawara Village in Mohali.
“They said it was in Sri Lanka but it was in India and they tried to run an entire cricket tournament that did not actually exist by publishing pictures of a ground the dressed up as if it was in Sri Lanka with advertising and everything, but was in India and was raided by the police," Marshall said. He said that players who are from poorer countries and whose wages have been affected by the pandemic are the chief targets.
"If you are offering a Zimbabwe player $10,000-30,000 -- and by the way almost always the young poor black Zimbabwe players report immediately to us -- that is the equivalent of buying a house," said Marshall.
Marshall said that he is delighted with the number of players coming forward with evidence. The ACU is currently investigating 42 live cases around the world.
"We are the only global sport to go after the corruptors outside our code. We will pursue all the corruptors we come across and we are interviewing people not covered by our code. When we come to publicising details of excluded people we will have to decide what we make public. I will be asking for mugshots, a good clear recent picture, full name and all their aliases but I will have to put that through the lawyers about how much information can go out," said Marshall.
"The first ones going through the system now are the most persistent corruptors we have been dealing with over the past few years. The purpose is to out these people and make their lives very difficult because they will get lots of publicity about being a cricket corruptor and hopefully that will stop them," he said.
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