Criminalising match fixing in india will be a game-changer- icc official

Business Standard Criminalising match-fixing in India will be a game-changer: ICC official

Legal experts have been advocating for years the need to criminalise matchfixing in India, the lack of which has meant that the hands of authorities have been tied.

A senior official of the ICC's anti-corruption unit feels that making match-fixing a criminal offence in India will be the "single-most-effective thing" in a country where the police are "operating with one hand tied behind their back" in the absence of any stringent law.

Legal experts have been advocating for years the need to criminalise match-fixing in India, the lack of which has meant that the hands of authorities have been tied when it comes to investigating corruption in the popular sport.

"At the moment with no legislation in place, we'll have good relations with Indian police, but they are operating with one hand tied behind their back," ICC ACU's coordinator of investigations, Steve Richardson, was quoted as saying by 'ESPNcricinfo'.

He added, "We will do everything we can to disrupt the corruptors. And we do, we make life very, very difficult for them as far and as much as we can to stop them from operating freely.

"But the legislation would be a game-changer in India. We have currently just under 50 investigations. The majority of those have links back to corruptors in India.

"So it would be the single-most-effective thing to happen in terms of protecting sport if India introduces match-fixing legislation."

With India set to host two ICC world events in the next three years, Richardson urged the Indian government to frame a legislation on match-fixing like its neighbour Sri Lanka, which became the first major cricket-playing country in South Asia to criminalise the corrupt practice in 2019.