Haggerty let-off in battle to lead ITF
Chief found innocent of breaching ethics code Stakeholders urged to work together in future
The race for the presidency of the International Tennis Federation continues to raise concerns about the governance of the sport after David Haggerty, the incumbent, escaped censure for what seemed to be a cavalier approach to electoral rules.
Telegraph Sport has already reported one potential inequality in the fact that Haggerty was able to attend regional meetings of the national tennis associations – the Tennis Europe annual meeting at the end of March, for instance, and the South American tennis confederation (CST) annual meeting in May.
Meanwhile, one of his three challengers for the role – David Miley, a 60-year-old Irishman – was blocked from attending either of these and was obliged to hold meetings in the hotel lobbies of Antananarivo when he travelled to Madagascar in May for the annual meeting of the African confederation, because he was not allowed into the conference hall itself.
This week, Haggerty has been declared innocent of any breach of the ITF’S newly assembled ethics code over his use of Jon Tibbs Associates (JTA), a communications firm based in Kent which distributed his manifesto in an email to media on June 10.
The firm had worked for the ITF up until May 31, which Miley suggested placed them in breach of the ethics code requirement that candidates must not “receive any support or services from the ITF, or ITF staff, including any consultants, agents or advisers”.
In a ruling published on Monday after studying the case, Sandra Osborne QC, the ethics commission chairman, said there was no breach of the code because JTA stopped working for the ITF on May 31 and started working for Haggerty on June 3.
She also acknowledged that Haggerty had been working on his manifesto through a related company named JTA Design before May 31. According to Companies House records, JTA Design is registered to the same address in Kent as JTA and has the same two company directors – Jonathan Tibbs and Sally-anne Tibbs.
Osborne said that she could see no evidence for further investigation and was declaring the matter closed. “JTA and JTA Design are separate corporate entities with separate staff and clients,” she said, citing an “absence of evidence to suggest that, by engaging the services of JTA Design, Haggerty was able to receive favourable services from the ITF”.
The 211 member nations of the ITF will vote on the presidency at the annual meeting in Lisbon at the end of September. The other candidates are Anil Khanna, from India, and Ivo Kaderka, of the Czech Republic.
Tennis’s governance model – which involves seven stakeholders comprising the four slams, the ITF and the men’s and women’s tours – is coming under increasing scrutiny after a chaotic year.
As All England Club chairman Philip Brook said during the tournament: “We would do a better job of running the sport if we worked more closely together as a group.”
Haggerty’s four-year term as ITF president has delivered the chaos of the World Tennis Tour – a radical restructuring of the lower levels of the game which enraged hundreds of players – and controversial revamps of the Davis Cup and Fed Cup.
Large sums of money are being promised to the nations who attend both these finals weeks, but there are significant doubts as to whether the new models will be sustainable if those supplying the money fail to recoup their investments.