Match-fixer pockets £150k as he rigs England Test at Lord’s
News Of The World: Match-fixer pockets £150k as he rigs England Test at Lord’s
THE News of the World has smashed a multi-million pound cricket match-fixing ring which RIGGED the current Lord’s Test between England and Pakistan.
In the most sensational sporting scandal ever, bowlers Mohammad Amir and Mohammad Asif delivered THREE blatant no-balls to order.
Their London-based fixer Mazhar Majeed, who let us in on the betting scam for £150,000, crowed “this is no coincidence” before the bent duo made duff deliveries at PRECISELY the moments promised to our reporter.
Armed with our damning dossier of video evidence, Scotland Yard launched their own probe into the scandal.
Millions around the world watched Pakistan star bowlers Mohammad Amir and Mohammad Asif deliver three no-balls in the Test against England on Thursday and Friday at the historic home of cricket, Lord’s in London.
Unsuspecting fans packed the ground yesterday to watch Pakistan collapse as they were bowled out for 74 in their first innings and forced to follow on.
But today our shock footage of the players’ fixer Mazhar Majeed taking a massive £150,000 cash, and telling us EXACTLY when the no-balls would come, proves the game was RIGGED.
Having already trousered a £10,000 upfront deposit – which he insisted had gone to the stars – Majeed sat in our west London hotel room at the Copthorne Tara on Wednesday night and eagerly counted out the £140,000 balance in bundles of crisp £50 notes – our “entry ticket” into his already successful betting scam.
Our undercover team was posing as front men for a Far East gambling cartel. In return for their suitcase of money Majeed then calmly detailed what would happen – and when – on the field of play next day, as a taster of all the lucrative information he could supply in future.
He promised: “I’m going to give you three no-balls to prove to you firstly that this is what’s happening. They’ve all been organised, okay?
“This is EXACTLY what’s going to happen, you’re going to SEE these three things happen. I’m telling you, if you play this right you’re going to make a lot of money, believe me!”
We can sensationally reveal Majeed identified young Pakistan captain Salman Butt as the ringleader of the band of cheats. He also named wicket keeper Kamran Akmal and boasted he had a total of SEVEN corrupt cricketers in his pocket, all banking huge sums from bookies and betting syndicates.
The scam, fuelled by greed, is a betrayal by the players not only of their sport but of their cricket-crazy homeland.
As millions back home in Pakistan struggle against hunger and disease amid devastating floods, the cheats were defiling the reputation of Lord’s and lining their own pockets.
In a meeting with our investigators puppet-master Majeed:
* BRAGGED that the scam is rife and future games against England this summer are already earmarked for cheating.
* CONFESSED his match-fixing round the world had netted customers MILLIONS.
* REVEALED how he oversees cheating by using no-balls, specifying how many runs will be scored or conceded in certain overs, with signals such as changing gloves to confirm the fix is on.
* ADMITTED he abuses his position as owner of non-league Croydon Athletic FC to launder his illicit gains.
At one stage Majeed told us our syndicate could make “absolutely millions, millions” by paying him up to £450,000 a time for info on matches, then placing bets on the fixed outcome. And he tried to excuse the players’ shameful behaviour, claiming: “These poor boys need to. They’re paid peanuts.”
Majeed said he had even opened Swiss bank accounts for them to hide their ill-gotten gains. We launched our investigation two weeks ago after a tip-off. The Pakistan side has long been dogged by match-fixing allegations. Only today has the full shocking extent been laid bare.
Property tycoon Majeed, 35, has a £1.8 million home in Surrey and is a familiar face at cricket grounds around the world. We infiltrated his criminal network posing as wealthy businessmen on the make.
Majeed turned up for our first meeting on Monday, August 16, at the Hilton in London’s Park Lane, dressed in jeans and a sweater. He immediately started bragging of his connections with the Pakistani team. “I manage ten of the players,” he told us. “I do all their affairs like contracts, sponsorship, marketing, everything. I work very closely with the PCB (Pakistan Cricket Board).”
Our reporters told him they wanted to organise their own Twenty20 tournament in the Middle East. Majeed claimed he would be able to provide his players for the right fee. When our man assured Majeed the players would do well out of it, he immediately said with a wink: “I know what you’re talking about because I know what goes on!”
Majeed then hinted at the extent of cheating in the game. . .
REPORTER: “If there’s two or three that are on for the other side, the betting side, then good luck – they’ll be really happy.”
MAJEED: “There’s more than two or three. Believe me. It’s already set up. That’s already there. I’m very wary speaking about this simply because I don’t know you guys. I’ve been dealing with these guys for seven years, okay? Who we deal with and how we deal with it is very, very important. This is the main thing. I’m only dealing with certain people. How we do it and what we do is very, very crucial.”
REPORTER: “You’re already dealing with another party on this matter? Give us some tips as well if you’ve got any. Happy to cut us in?”
MAJEED: “Yeah I’ll give you tips.”
REPORTER: “If there’s anything we need to know in the forthcoming match let me know. Happy to pay.”
Majeed said he was worried our men could be wearing tape recorders and he would check them out before going further.
Two days later at the Bombay Brasserie Indian restaurant in central London, Majeed told us we had begun to gain his trust. He had spent the day at the Oval where Pakistan bowled England out for 233 on the first day of the third Test. After a trusted source vouched for our credentials, Majeed relaxed and laid his cards on the table. . .
MAJEED: “I do feel that I can speak to you about this, okay? Now, yes. . . there is very big money in it.”
REPORTER: “There’s still? I know there was, but they clamped down on match fixing I heard.”
MAJEED: “They’ve toned down match-fixing a lot, yeah. They’ve made it very, very difficult. These guys won’t deal with just anybody. The only reason they’ll deal with me is because they know I’m professional, they’ve known me for years.
“I’ve been doing it with them, the Pakistani team, for about 2½ years. And we’ve made masses and masses of money.”
Later that night Majeed boasted how it was the players who got HIM into match-fixing. He told us: “The players would never tell anybody else. They were the ones who actually approached me about this. This is the beauty of it.
“I was friends with them for four, five years and then they said this happens. I said really?”
Majeed then described how the betting scam operates. He reached into a carrier bag, pulled out a white BlackBerry phone and flicked through a series of messages.
“I deal with an Indian party,” he said. “They pay me for the information.”
Then Majeed explained how many cricket bets are placed on what he called “brackets” – events happening in a group of 10 overs.
If players score well in the first three overs punters would be likely to bet on that continuing for the next seven. But if the fixed players then deliberately STOP scoring or slow down, anybody in on it can “make a killing”, said Majeed. The same happens with bowlers giving away runs or throwing no-balls.
Not only is Majeed’s information invaluable to syndicates involved in spread betting – where wagers are staked on a range of possible outcomes – it is also golddust for shady bookies looking to manipulate the odds in their favour.
The following night – Thursday August 19 – Majeed demanded £10,000 then revealed to us there would be two no-balls in the following day’s Oval play.
That fix was cancelled on the day. So was a promised maiden over by captain Salman Butt on the Saturday – final day of the Test England lost. But days later – with our extra £140,000 in his hands – he delivered the promised goods at Lord’s.
Last night a Scotland Yard spokesman said: “Following information from the News of the World we have today arrested a 35-year-old man on suspicion of conspiracy to defraud bookmakers.”
Scotland Yard officers last night visited Lord’s and the Pakistan players’ London hotel. Police are set to speak to the players today.
In a joint statement issued early today, the International Cricket Council, the England and Wales Cricket Board and the Pakistan Cricket Board confirmed the Test would resume today as planned.
The statement added all three bodies were assisting the police with their inquiries, but as the matter was under investigation they would not be making any further comment.
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Fixer predicting correctly the no balls
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and that’s why pak is in such mess. Would love to see LHC sanction this lawyer and put fines on him for wasting court time. Wat a moron.
Geo: Pakistan match-fix players hit with treason charge
and the looney court that is LHC keep showing how completly insane they have become.
Geo: http://geo.tv/8-31-2010/70734.htm
LAHORE: Lahore High Court (LHC) has issued notices to Sports Minister Ijaz Jakhrani and Chairman PCB Ijaz Butt, summoning duo on September 7 in response to petition in connection with match fixing allegation on Pakistani players in Lord’s Test, Geo News reported.
The petitioner Advocate Ishtiaq Chaudhry pleaded before court that players, involved in match fixing allegations, have maligned name of Pakistan worldwide, seeking stern punishment for them.
The petitioner also recommended honorable court for banning involved players from all forms of cricket for lifetime.
Consequently, LHC issued notices to PCB Chairman and Sports Minister to appear before court on September 7.
Thank u Mr, James Lawton
James Lawton: Where was Clarke’s disdain when Stanford came calling to buy up cricket’s dignity?
Lighting up the darkness of the Pakistan betting scam is something rather more than a flicker of compassion for Mohammad Aamer.
It is shaping into a consensus that if he was one of the perpetrators he is also potentially the most conspicuous victim. This was nowhere reflected with more poignancy than in the admission of the great England bowler Bob Willis that he was moved close to tears by the news that the stunning young prospect had been placed at the heart of the conspiracy.
There have been similar reactions from other major figures in English cricket. Geoff Boycott shook his head and said that we were in the middle of a cricketing tragedy, one that he hoped did not inevitably prevent the rehabilitation of the youth who dazzled Lord’s with his brilliance last Friday morning.
Sir Ian Botham was another mourner. True, there could be no quarter for corruption, but the case of Aamer maybe presented another kind of challenge, one not just of retribution but perhaps a little understanding of circumstances that sent him so quickly down the wrong road.
However, there was not a scintilla of such feeling in the expression of the chairman of the England and Wales Cricket Board, Giles Clarke, when he was obliged to present Aamer with a £4,000 cheque after he was named Pakistan’s man of the Test series.
Indeed, so much disdain was packed into Clarke’s expression it seemed a little odd that he had not conducted the forlorn ceremony equipped with a face mask and plastic gloves.
The truth is that it is impossible not to look at the resulting photograph splashed across the world yesterday and not recall another shot of the ECB chief while attending a somewhat different official occasion at Lord’s two years ago.
You may just remember it. Clarke was in the company of Sir Allen Stanford and a huge Perspex container bulging with crisp $50 notes, $20m worth of them.
Stanford was allowed to fly his private helicopter, trimmed in gold leaf, down on to the manicured grass. A fine welcoming committee, including Botham and his old friend Sir Vivian Richards, had been assembled. Effusive was maybe a mild description of this reception for the man who had made such an extravagant deal for the staging of Twenty20 games in his adopted island of Antigua.
When, soon enough, US Federal investigators charged Stanford with cheating his shareholders by as much as $5.6bn, the resulting embarrassment was considerable, not enough though to persuade Clarke it might be a good idea to resign. However, he did concede that forging the Stanford connection had been a mistake – not a faulty principle, opening the gates of cricket, and its headquarters, to money from wherever it came, with scarcely a nod to due diligence, and putting sheer greed at the top of the cricketing agenda.
The young England batsman Alistair Cook put it diplomatically enough when he said if the Twenty20 cricket in Antigua was not important, the money was.
The point here, though, is that the mature, successful, Rugby- educated head of English cricket admitted he made a mistake. He didn’t do it for personal gain, admittedly, but he did put his trust in someone who soon enough was proved utterly unworthy of it.
This, pretty much, is what a barely literate product of one of the world’s poorest, and most corrupt, societies did when he accepted the influence of team-mates, one of whom, Mohammad Asif, had already been suspended for a drug offence. Yet there was no ambivalence in the body language of Giles Clarke when, in effect, he dismissed the presence of a young man who, whatever his culpability, was plainly inhabiting a nightmare.
To be fair to Clarke, it has to be said that his support of Pakistan cricket in the time of desperate crisis, with a boycott imposed by prospective touring teams following the terrorist attack on the Sri Lanka team in Lahore early last year, has been strong and admirable, and last Sunday lunch-time he may well have been feeling a sense of betrayal.
Still, there was a heavy implication in Clarke’s demeanour that all the wrongs of cricket, the illegal betting explosion in India which provides such a magnetic lure for the match-fixers, the corruption which brought down the captains of South Africa and India, Hansie Cronje and Mohammad Azharuddin, the long history of Pakistan cricket’s laxity in imposing discipline, could be conveniently placed on some young and drooping shoulders.
This was the shock of that painfully explicit photograph. There were no shades of meaning, no understanding of wider problems, in this building in which, from time to time, men of vastly greater experience and fortune than the devastated Aamer had had reason to hang their heads in shame. We need only skim the surface of English cricket to encounter some significant outcrops of hypocrisy.
There was the sacrificing of Harold Larwood, on whom the bodyline crisis which threatened relations between Australia and a perfidious mother country was conveniently dumped. There was the exclusion of Basil D’Oliveira from the tour of South Africa, after he made 158 and took vital wickets in an Oval Ashes Test and then refused to stand down despite an offer from a South African businessmen of a house, a car, £40,000 and a 10-year-contract to coach black players in the homeland which never allowed him to play first-class cricket. None of the workers of such moral atrocities were ever required to stand in shame, without the smallest gesture towards their vulnerable humanity, in the way that Mohammad Aamer was last Sunday.
This is wrong not because Aamer is innocent, and can reasonably hope to escape without some punishment for his misdeeds. It is just too judgemental, too easy, and does not begin to recognise the fact that cricket did nothing to protect arguably its brightest star. Where were the leaders of cricket when the dynamics of the boy’s downfall were being put in place? Universally, it seems they were on other business, some of it fawning on crooks with bags of gold.
I would like to personally lynch them. These scum bags should be strung up. All this bullshit about conspiracy is rubbish. Its like Zardari crying foul at all the charges against him.
What is the real hidden untold news story behind the cricket spot-fixing headlines? Cricket agent Mazhar Majeed, 36, remains only a front man, a sideshow or fig-leaf. Majeed was greedy and stupid. But the real match-spot fixer-recruiter got away with millions. The mastermind tempted and coerced sportsmen with free five-star dinners and top luxury cars for days in Dubai. Crime pays criminals who hide their ill-gotten gains, evade taxes, launder money, and mock justice. Investigative journalism and law enforcement are dead. This was a tip of the iceberg. Spot and match fixing remains as old as the games, and it will never end. So, who knows the manipulative mastermind match fixer who made millions from this reported, and many other unreported global scams? Law enforcement agencies failed to trace, trap, investigate and make the masterminds face the music in the UK. The shameless fraudster feels no regrets as he and his beneficiaries enjoy the fruits of their crimes and scams in the UK and abroad. The mastermind mocks British law enforcement and judicial system. Can you name the mastermind? Contact the author of this brief when there is need trace the fugitive, and uncover the complete untold news behind the headlines.