- Lanka T10 team owner arrested on match-fixing charges
- A foreign player had flagged a fixing approach made by the Galle Marvels owner
Prem Thakkur, the owner of Galle Marvels a franchise in the Lanka T10 League, has recently been apprehended in connection with match-fixing allegations.
Prem Thakkur, the owner of Galle Marvels team in Lanka T10, has been arrested on match-fixing allegations. Thakkur was arrested on a Thursday, which was a day after the commencement of the tournament, and was presented before the Colombo magistrate court the following Friday; Here, he has been remanded until around December 16th since then.
Match Fixing in Lanka T10
In a statement issued to ESPNcricinfo, Sri Lankan Police confirmed the arrest of Prem Thakkur, an Indian resident, by Officers of the SriLanka Sports Police Unit as part of the 2019 Prevention of Offences Relating to Sports Act. The suspect was arrested at a hotel in Kandy that is one of the venues for the Lanka 10 T master tournament. It is understood that a foreign player had flagged a fixing approach made by Thakkur. As in the LPL held in a year earlier, representatives from the ICC are also in Sri Lanka at the request of Sri Lankan cricket authorities to oversee the tournament on behalf of the ICC.
As much as SLC has not yet commented on this issue, Lanka T10 tournament director Samantha Dodanwela has clearly stated that the tournament ‘will go ahead as scheduled’.” This is the second franchise tournament in Sri Lanka this year in which a team owner has been arrested under the sports anti-corruption ordinance of this country. The DPL franchise Dambulla Thunders co-owner Tamim Rahman was arrested in May under alleged match-fixing. In South Asia, it was in 2019 that Sri Lanka became the first country to legalize the crime of match-fixing such as offences of forgery, creation of fake accounts in financial institution, impersonating others, threats, bribery and others of this nature the law prescribed.
The event rights of the tournament are owned and operated by a consortium which includes the Innovative Production Group, T Ten Sports Management and T Ten Global Sports, which also runs other T10 franchise leagues around the world, thus the Lanka T10 is the first time Sri Lanka is venturing into the hosting of T10 franchise league.