Cricket: Mysterious slaying of man who knew too much

By STEVE BOGGAN

In India, they called him the man who knew too much.

Ashraf Patel was rich and well-connected, a regular fixture at Bombay's glittering Bollywood parties, but it was his connections that may have got him killed.

Not his friendships with diamond dealers, shady businessmen or film stars.

Instead, Patel may have been shot in a Bombay street because of his love of betting on cricket.

Patel, 40, was a successful gem dealer and businessman with distribution rights to brands such as Cartier and Tissot.

In Bombay, he would shower gifts on film stars and cricketers - held in equally high esteem in India - in the hope that they would endorse his products. And they did.

Last April, after his murder, an Indian magazine, The Week, said he had become very close to several cricketers and even accompanied the team to tournaments in Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates.

Here the cricketing alarm bells started to ring, for Sharjah had become a byword for alleged match-fixing.

Organisers admit it has happened there, and the Surrey skipper, Adam Hollioake, was once called there in his hotel by a man who offered to "make him very wealthy."

Hollioake didn't take up the offer.

The alarm bells rang louder still when police discovered Patel had bookmaking contacts in South Africa.

That was where the whole match-fixing debacle took its biggest scalp with the demise of Hansie Cronje, the squeaky-clean captain of the South African cricket team.

Cronje's admission last year, before a board of inquiry headed by Judge Edwin King, that he took four bribes to fix matches triggered Paul Condon's inquiry.

Cronje was banned for life, and Condon was appointed head of a seven-man anti-corruption unit dedicated to weeding out cheating and setting in place mechanisms to prevent it.

But his task was enormous.

There have been claims and counter-claims of cheating, bribing and fixing in eight of the 10 test-playing nations.

In Pakistan, test-players Salim Malik and Ata-ur-Rehman were banned for life when they were found to have affected matches for the benefit of bookmakers.

In India, Kapil Dev has been accused of involvement, and Cronje told the King inquiry he had taken money from a man introduced to him by Mohammad Azharuddin, former captain of India.

Azharuddin, also banned for life, was questioned by Bombay police after the shooting of Patel because the two had met two days earlier.

The deputy commissioner of police, Jai Jeet Singh, said: "He will be questioned again and again. This is not a small case. We are working on the match-fixing link. It cannot be ruled out of the murder inquiry."

Condon has warned players they can run but they cannot hide, so more may yet emerge.

He has recommended increasing players' wages - adequate in England but poor in Asia - to make corruption less attractive.

"That's a good idea," said Stephen Fay, editor of Wisden Cricket Monthly. "A good cricketer in England can earn about £100,000 ($337,000), which should be enough to ward off temptation.

"But in India and Pakistan, the wages are very poor, so players are more easily tempted. The problem with that is that corrupt people are always corrupt. They may simply get more greedy."

The rewards for Asian syndicates who try to rig games are understood to be huge, although the amounts players claim they have been offered seem suspiciously low, usually only about £5000 ($17,000), which suggests larger amounts may not have been disclosed.

But the murdered man certainly loved two things: cricket and money. And he knew too much about one of them.

- INDEPENDENT

Sir Paul Condon's report