Corruption: A General Speaks out !!

March 30, 2007

Anti-corruption chief ‘skimming the surface’ of illegal gamblingOwen Slot in Karachi
If it has seemed over the past few days that cricket and illegal betting are incurably connected, an alternative view comes from – of all places – Karachi, where the head of the city’s Anti-Corruption Establishment declares that three years ago he came within sight of stamping out underground gambling houses completely.

Karachi is split into 19 “towns”, the equivalent of boroughs, and Inspector General Asad Ashia Malik assigned a force of 190 officers, ten to go undercover in each of them. Between 2002 and 2004, they conducted 38 raids and made 1,032 arrests. “I almost wiped the evil out altogether,” Malik said yesterday. “I think I accounted for 80 per cent of it. All the big strong groups I smashed. The other 20 per cent were those without a permanent base. They mainly moved in cars, often to the beaches, packing up and moving on fast.

“I played first-class cricket myself from 1979 to 1990 [he bowled off spin and once took the wicket of Rashid Latif, the former Pakistan wicketkeeper], but the problems started when big money came into cricket. The arrival of the mobile phone made it even worse.”

In 2004, Malik was promoted from chief of police to the head of the anticorruption unit. For the record, he is not impressed with the police work being carried out in Jamaica in the wake of Bob Woolmer’s murder, but at home he says that while illegal gambling is a huge industry, it is not one that is uncontrollable.

“I’d say there are now about 50 illegal gambling houses operating at any single time,” he said. “They are an underworld mafia, often dealing in narcotics and gambling side by side. The police keep raiding them and making arrests, but they surface elsewhere and we start again.” The bad news for cricket, though, is that while Malik believes he can make inroads in his own city, he is just skimming the surface of cricket’s problem. In Karachi, they may gamble on cricket, but the industry is controlled from Dubai and Bombay.

However, he said, cricket could do an infinitely better job of policing itself. The ICC’s own anticorruption unit would be served better, Malik believes, if there was better policing of tours, where bookmakers can masquerade as fans and come into contact with players. “Senior police officers should be attached in the specific role of an anticorruption watchdog,” he said. He also advocates an internal financial checking system whereby the assets of players should be declared annually to their own cricket boards. Ironically, this recommendation formed part of the report put to the Pakistan Cricket Board seven years ago, which appears to have fallen on deaf ears.

The report was the result of an 18-month investigation by the High Court judge, Justice Malik Mohammad Qayyum, into match-fixing involving the Pakistan cricket team and led to Salim Malik, a former Pakistan captain, being banned. Other players were also reprimanded, notably Inzamam-ul-Haq (fined) and Mushtaq Ahmed, the present assistant coach, whom Qayyum recommended should never again be allowed a position of responsibility in the national side.

Qayyum said yesterday that he feared Woolmer’s death could have been avoided had his report not been “swept like dust under the carpet”. Sarfraz Nawaz, the former Test player who has made a number of unsubstantiated claims about corruption in the game, also repeated allegations on national television that he had proof that the Pakistan team had been gambling.

“My recommendations were implemented to an extent,” Qayyum said, “but now it seems they are being ignored. It just seems I was wasting my own time. In this country, we feel that cricket is really a part of us. Now we feel betrayed.”

Inspector General Malik also said he feared that the gambling industry was behind Woolmer’s murder. “I believe it was due to the affairs of betting,” he said. “The amount of money involved is millions and the people involved are very ruthless people. Maybe Woolmer was approached and just didn’t succumb to the pressure.”

He is unimpressed by both the security arrangements at the World Cup and the standard of the investigation into Woolmer’s death. “So far they haven’t contacted us to ask about betting patterns or anything and that is surprising,” he said. “To my assessment, the investigation is not very sharp. How many days was it before they were looking at the CCTV footage? Almost a week. I don’t know why. I am astonished that they do not know yet who visited every room.

“And when foreign teams visit Pakistan, we have a security man posted outside every room. In 2004, when India toured Pakistan, we had a man outside every room and no one could have gone into any of them without being checked. When a foreign coach is killed in his hotel room, that is what I call a major lapse of security.”

another big wig singing his own praise. what new...