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 The case against former 187-ranked player Nick Lindahl reached court
after reports surfaced last week that tennis authorities had failed
to deal with widespread match-fixing, marring the opening of the
year's first Grand Slam tournament.
Lindahl pleaded guilty in a Sydney court to one charge related to
match-fixing in a minor 2013 tournament but will contest a separate
evidence-tampering charge on technical grounds. Two other charges
were dropped by prosecutors after the guilty plea.
Prosecutor Kate Young told the court that in September 2013, when
playing at the Toowoomba Futures Tournament, Lindahl offered to
intentionally lose a match to a lower-ranked player and informed an
associate so that he could wager against him.
A transcript of telephone calls intercepted by police after the
match and read in court appeared to show Lindahl coaching an
associate on how to hide evidence from investigators and admitting
to doing the same himself.
"Just get rid of it ... just get rid of everything," Lindahl said in
the transcript, which was read by Young.
Lindahl, who was arrested a year ago, faces a maximum penalty of 10
years imprisonment on the charge to which he pleaded guilty and will
be sentenced on April 15.
His lawyer, Troy Edwards, said the timing of the case coming to
court amid a blaze of publicity about suspected match fixing and the
Australian Open tournament was unfortunate.
"The matter was set to be heard before Christmas but there was a
sick barrister and Nick asked me to agree to a delay," Edwards told
Reuters. "And now it's all kind of blown up in his face."
BETTING SUSPENDED
Betting agency Sportsbet noticed heavy gambling on the relatively
minor match and suspended betting before alerting police.
Similar suspicious betting prompted Pinnacle Sports, a Curaçao-based
sports gambling company, to suspend bets on a mixed doubles match at
the Australian Open on Sunday.
Unusually large amounts of money were placed on Andrea Hlavackova
and Lukasz Kubot to beat Lara Arruabarrena and David Marrero,
Pinnacle told the New York Times.
Heavy betting moved the odds on the match sharply over a 30 minute
period more than 12 hours before the match began, data from sports
odds comparison service Odds Portal shows.
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Tennis regulators accept betting fluctuations can be an indicator of
suspicious activity, but stress it is not sufficient to prove match
fixing.
Nobody was immediately available to comment at Pinnacle or the
Tennis Integrity Unit (TIU), the London-based body set up to counter
corruption in the sport.
Tennis Australia said in a statement it would continue to work with
police and the TIU in regard to "integrity matters".
In an interview with the New York Times, Arruabarrena and Marrero
denied any match fixing, with Marrero saying a knee injury affected
their performance.
Kubot and Hlavackova told reporters they had spoken with TIU
officials and were "surprised" by the allegations. They said they
had no reason to believe that their opponents had intentionally
thrown the match.
"We won yesterday, the match. We gave 100 percent in that match and
that’s it," Kubot said.
Tennis authorities have rejected reports by the BBC and online
BuzzFeed News, which said 16 players who have been ranked in the top
50 had been repeatedly flagged to the TIU over suspicions they had
thrown matches in the past decade.
(This version of the story corrects misspelling of "prompted" in
paragraph 11.)
(Additional reporting by Colin Packham in Sydney and Nick Mulvenney
and Ian Ransom in Melbourne; Editing by Lincoln Feast)
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