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Wednesday, November 27, 2024  
24 Jumada Al-Awwal 1446  

Spot-fixing case: Butt, Asif found guilty

The former Pakistan captain, Salman Butt, has been found guilty of conspiracy in the spot-fixing trial, announced the London court on Tuesday.

The judge, Mr Justice Cook, is likely to hand down the punishment to Former captain Salman Butt next week.

Mohammad Asif, the former world No2 bowler, has been found guilty of conspiracy to cheat in the fourth Test against England at Lord's in August 2010 but the jury was unable to reach a verdict on the charge of whether he accepted corrupt payments. The judge has sent the jury out to deliberate on that second charge.

Butt and Asif were charged after an undercover reporter allegedly recorded the sports agent Mazhar Majeed, now 36, boasting of how he could arrange for Pakistan players to rig games for money, London's Southwark crown court was told. Over three weeks of evidence, the jury heard that there are huge sums to be made by fixing cricket matches for gambling syndicates.

The allegations emerged after the News of the World's former investigations editor, Mazher Mahmood, approached Majeed in August last year pretending to be a wealthy Indian businessman seeking major international cricketers for a tournament. After gaining the agent's confidence, the journalist broached the subject of rigging games.

Majeed claimed he had been carrying out match-fixing for two and a half years, the court heard, had seven players from Pakistan's national side working for him, and had made "masses and masses of money".

He told the undercover reporter that fixing part of a match would cost between £50,000-£80,000, but rigging results was much more expensive – around £400,000 for a Twenty20 game and as much as £1m for a five-day Test. The agent was secretly filmed allegedly accepting £150,000 in cash from the journalist as part of an arrangement to rig games.