Nasir Jamshed sentenced to 17 months in prison over spot-fixing

LONDON: Former Pakistan batsman Nasir Jamshed was jailed for 17 months on Friday after pleading guilty to conspiracy to bribe fellow cricketers as part of a Twenty20 spot-fixing scheme.

Jamshed, 30, was arrested last February with two other men, Yousef Anwar, 36, and Mohammed Ijaz, 34, as part of an American National Bureau of Crime investigation into a so-called fixed location. Anwar from Hayes, West London, played the most important role in the plan and was sentenced to three years and four months in prison. IJaz from Sheffield in northern England was sentenced to two years and six months in prison.

Jamshed lives in Wallsall in central England and played Test, a twenty-two-year international cricket match for Pakistan. All three acknowledged their role in the conspiracy during the last hearing. Judge Richard Mansell sentenced them to all counts at the Royal Court of Manchester in north-west England and said that Anwar and Iggaz were involved in “complex and organized criminal activities.”

He added that James Shedd “easily succumbs to the temptation of financial rewards.” “This corruption has been going on for a long time in cricket matches,” he said in court. “If anything, because of the popular television broadcast of international T20 in all major cricket countries in the last decade. The increase in tournaments, combined with the huge increase in online gambling, has made matters worse.

“Cricket, especially the T20 tournaments in Bangladesh, Pakistan and India, are vulnerable to corruption and there is a huge, largely unregulated online gambling industry on the Indian subcontinent.” Senior NCA investigator Ian McConnell said after the hearing, “These people are abusing the privilege of getting international professional cricket to corrupt the game and undermine public confidence in their money.”

Penalty plan

An undercover police officer invaded the network by disguising himself as a member of a corrupt gambling syndicate.

His work led at the end of 2016 to an attempt to repair the Bangladeshi Premier League (BPL) and to an actual repair of the Pakistani Premier League (PSL) in February 2017.

In both cases, the opening batsman for the Twenty20 game agreed to receive a total of $ 39,000 (35,000 euros) in exchange for not scoring more than the first two goals.

The Bangladesh “two-point system” plan was eventually canceled for bribery purposes.

He then turned into an offender and encouraged other players to settle on site during the PSL match between Islamabad United and Peshawar Zalmi in Dubai on February 9.

The court was told that a corrupt gambling group could earn hundreds of thousands of pounds by making this direct positioning through fraudulent bets on the field, which is safe as long as they almost certainly win.

Jamshed, who has appeared in court more than 60 times before his country, denied the bribery of PSL but made his guilty plea guilty after hearing in December. Last year, Jamshed was banned from playing cricket for 10 years after an investigation by the anti-corruption unit of the Pakistani Cricket Board.