Wimbledon’s £1m bill for match-fixing investigation

Wimbledon is among the tennis bodies facing a bill of more than £ 1million from the sport’s long- running inquiry into match-fixing.

Frustration is growing in the game about delays in publication of the inquiry’s findings and the spiralling costs of the independent commission, whose work will soon enter a third year.

Tennis is facing a total bill of about £10m as the independent Review Panel report keeps missing its scheduled release dates.

Seven bodies will share the cost: each of the four Grand Slams, the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA), the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP) and the international Tennis Federation (iTF).

Wimbledon is among those whose frustration is mounting while there will be a knock- on effect on british tennis as the lawn Tennis Associationon receives the surpluss money from the Championships each year.

Sportsmail understands much of the delay is down to the inquiry’s criticism of several individuals and organisations — and thehe resultant ‘maxwellisation’.on’.

This is the legal processocess whereby parties who have been criticised in a report are given the opportunity to argue in their own defence before findings are made public.

The criticism is believed to focus on parties involved in the initial response to possible match-fixing after reports that tennis might have a problem emerged just over 10 years ago.

it was at the season’s opening Grand Slam in Australia nearly two years ago that the sport’s various governing bodies, in a rare show of unity, decided to appoint an independent panel to look at the issue after a news report by American internet media company buzzFeed and the bbC.

Convened under the leadership of london QC Adam lewis, a team of lawyers have been looking at the issue, which goes back more than a decade and coincided with the expansion of online gambling.

The review panel says it has interviewed more than 100 people within tennis and more than 50 from outside it.

The report was originally due to be published last summer and another deadline came and went late last month. While it is now hoped that it will be published before Christmas, many fear it will not see the light of day until next year and could clash with the start of the season and January’s Australian open.

Frustration among Grand Slam organisers partly stems from the fact that it has been repeatedly shown that most match-fixing problems seem to have originated in the lower tiers of the tour, well away ffrom the biggest events and the top 100 players. TThat there is still an isissue at the Challenger ttier and, particularly, the far-flung bottomrung Futures level, is bbeyond dispute.

The sport’s rulers hhave made moves to combatco this with plans for a new transition tour to feed into the lowest level of the professional game. There is also talk of reducing the number of ranked players of each sex to around 500 to 750 — in other words, those genuinely making a living from tennis.

The review panel has also looked closely at merging the anticorruption Tennis integrity Unit and the game’s anti- doping programme into one independent body charged with safeguarding the sport’s integrity.

initial preparations for that eventuality are already said to be in motion.

many informed observers will feel that the fight against doping — which is still relatively underfunded with barely £3m spent annually — is a much greater problem than match-fixing, which seems to happen more in what is, effectively, the largely amateur level of the sport.