BBC and BuzzFeed News on Sunday revealed secret files "exposing evidence of widespread suspected match fixing at the top level of world tennis, including at Wimbledon," according to Simon Cox of the BBC.
Over the last decade 16 players who have ranked in the top 50 "have been repeatedly flagged to the tennis integrity unit over suspicions they have thrown matches."
All of the players, including winners of Grand Slam titles, "were allowed to continue competing."
The Tennis Integrity Unit -- set up to police the sport -- said that "it had a zero-tolerance approach to betting-related corruption."
The cache of documents passed to the BBC and Buzzfeed News include the findings of an investigation set up in '07 by the organizing body, the ATP. The documents "show the enquiry found betting syndicates in Russia, northern Italy and Sicily making hundreds of thousands of pounds betting on games investigators thought to be fixed." Three of these games were at Wimbledon.
In a confidential report for the tennis authorities in '08, the enquiry team said that 28 players involved in these games "should be investigated but the findings were never followed up." Tennis introduced a new anti-corruption code in '09 but after taking legal advice was told previous corruption offenses "could not be pursued." A group of whistle blowers inside tennis, who wanted to remain anonymous, recently passed the documents on to the BBC and Buzzfeed News. We contacted Mark Phillips, one of the betting investigators in the '07 enquiry, who said that "they discovered there was repeated suspicious betting activity about a clear group." Phillips:
"There was a core of about 10 players who we believed were the most common perpetrators that were at the root of the problem." The BBC and Buzzfeed "were also passed on the names of other current players the TIU have repeatedly been warned about by betting organisations, sports integrity units and professional gamblers."
The BBC and Buzzfeed News "have decided not to name the players because without access to their phone, bank and computer records it is not possible to determine whether they may have been personally taking part in match fixing."
However tennis's integrity unit "does have the power to demand all this evidence from any professional tennis player" (BBC, 1/17).
