Match rigger Majeed boasts of syndicate’s shady fortune

LONDON - Cricket match fixer Mazhar Majeed has boasted that cheating in the sport is rife, and added that in one controversial Test this year, a shady betting syndicate netted over 830,000 pounds.

His revelation that fixes go on in all forms of the game - Tests, One Dayers and Twenty20 - will horrify millions around the world who follow the sport, The News of the Word reports.

Cricket authorities will now be forced to confront, once and for all, the match-fixing rumors that have dogged the noble game for years.

High on their list of investigations will be the Second Test between Australia and Pakistan in Sydney last January.

At the start of the fifth and final day Pakistan were in a supremely dominant position… but managed to lose dramatically.

“The odds for Pakistan to lose that match, for Australia to win that match, were I think 40-1. We let them get up to 150 then everyone lost their wickets. That one we made 1.3. But that’s what I mean, you can get up to a million. Tests is where the biggest money is because those situations arise,” Majeed is reported to have told News of The World

The spoils of Majeed’s sordid trade have brought him a life of luxury in which he mixes with superstars of film, TV and sport.

At the August 18 meeting, he boasted how he was involved in movies and name-dropped stars.

Majeed also bragged of knowing one of the world’s top tennis players and claimed he had arranged for Salman Butt to be in pictures with pop stars and a world famous US rapper.

It was during the Bombay Brasserie meeting that he revealed the Oval test being played at the time against England was fixed.

Majeed, who runs a property company with a multi-million pound portfolio called Bluesky Developments, also admitted being party to ball tampering, another cheating ruse that has blighted cricket. (ANI)