'Match-fixing is legal in SA'

Times Media

TELFORD VICE, Johannesburg

Crimes against cricket commonly called match-fixing, which is back in the spotlight following revelations by Lou Vincent, are legal in SA.

Two weeks ago, former New Zealand batsman Vincent said the Champions League T20 that was played in SA in October, 2012 had been stained by the scourge. However, even if that claim was to be proven it seems the perpetrators would not attract the authorities’ attention.

“There is no specific law in our country against match-fixing; that’s why Hansie managed to get away,” Enver Mall, a lawyer who has served SA cricket as a match referee and a national selector, said yesterday.

That raises the spectre of SA becoming a refuge for fugitives from the law in countries that have taken a tougher stance against the practice.

Last July in India, where betting on cricket is big business despite being outlawed, charges were brought against former SA captain Hansie Cronje - whose involvement with cricket’s underworld was exposed in 2000.

In New Zealand, legislation to criminalise match-fixing is being pushed through parliament to be in force before the 2015 World Cup in Australasia. Transgressors could be imprisoned for up to seven years.

Jail already looms for match-fixers in the United Kingdom, where Mohammad Amir, Mohammad Asif and Salman Butt were put behind bars in November, 2011 for “conspiracy to cheat and conspiracy to accept corrupt payments” after agreeing to bowl no-balls with specific deliveries during the Lord’s test between England and Pakistan in August, 2010.

In sentencing them, judge Jeremy Cooke said, “The image and integrity of what was once a game but is now a business is damaged in the eyes of all ...”

Cooke’s powerful words will have resonated with cricket aficionados everywhere, but they would carry no weight in a SA court. Or, as Mall said, “A primary law has to have been broken before someone can be charged with conspiracy - conspiracy to commit murder, for instance.”

Perhaps the only avenue for justice for match-fixers in SA lay in fraud charges.

“If I have paid to watch a professional cricket match where I expect both teams to play to their full potential and I find out afterwards that they did not, a case of fraud could be opened,” Mall said. “But fraud is one of the most difficult crimes to prove.”

Betting on sport is legal in SA, but the International Centre for Sport Security say that 80% of the US$140-billion spent on the practice worldwide annually is invested illegally.

SA’s Prevention and Combating of Corrupt Activities Act of 2004 covers sport. However, the law’s value is questionable in the wake of evidence of match-fixing in the warm-up matches Bafana Bafana played before the 2010 World Cup fizzling out in a squabble over jurisdiction between government and FIFA instead of being heard in the courts.

Rebel-era SA wicketkeeper Ray Jennings was not convinced that legislation was the most effective weapon against match-fixing.

“There are so many laws against this in India but it still goes on,” Jennings said. “When you sit at an Indian Premier League (IPL) player auction and you hear (former IPL supremo) Lalit Modi saying that (former England allrounder) Andrew Flintoff’s deal has been decided behind closed doors, it’s not match-fixing but it still tells you things are not what they should be.”

Instead of relying on the state, Jennings said, cricket should police itself: “People who have their ears to the floor should take control of this. The biggest penalty should be that those involved in match-fixing are subjected to the loss of faith in them by the people around them.”