Having reviewed spot-fixing allegations made against their players in a new documentary on corruption by Al Jazeera, Cricket Australia has cleared that it has not found any good enough evidence to take further legal action regarding the matter.
CEO James Sutherland on Tuesday, August 28th, said that Al Jazeera was set to broadcast a follow-up documentary to its May aired programme “Cricket’s Match Fixers”, which made allegations of pitch-doctoring at two test matches and sport-fixing at others.
Earlier, ICC, the game's governing body, were strongly critical of Al Jazeera for not providing them the unedited footage of the documentary from the original version to help its own probe into the matter.
Now, Sutherland in a release stated, “There are fresh spot-fixing claims against current and former Australian players relating to historical matches from 2011”
“Cricket Australia’s Integrity Unit has conducted a review of the latest claims by Al Jazeera … and from the limited information provided, our team have not identified any issues of corruption relating to current or former Australian players,” he added, “We have handed all material over to the ICC Anti-Corruption Unit to enable them to fully investigate and we will continue to cooperate with the ICC.”
The ICC has already said that “absence of any cooperation” from the broadcaster had “slowed” their interrogation but the global body has made “good progress”.
Alex Marshall, ICC’s Anti-Corruption Unit (ACU), has, in a statement, said, “We will provide a full update at the conclusion of the investigation,” and in the wake of a follow-up documentary likely to be released, the ICC had already contacted an “independent betting analysis company” to further evolute the matter.
“As with the first programme we have and will continue to ask for the cooperation of the broadcaster, Access to the raw, unedited footage enables us to build a complete picture around the claims in the documentary and ensure our investigation is as fair and thorough as possible,” Alex concluded.
(Inputs from Reuters)
