Lord Paul Condon was appointed by the International Cricket Council in June 2000 to lead cricket's Anti-Corruption Unit (the ACU), an independent body supported by a US$4 million budget to cover the period up to the 2003 ICC Cricket World Cup. The Unit has acted decisively and thoroughly in its fight to rid cricket of malpractice and corruption. All 24 of the recommendations identified in its major interim report of April 2001, have since been implemented, or are in the process of implementation by the ICC.

How do you assess the progress made by the ACU and world cricket since June 2001?

The last serious concerns we have had, about match-fixing or fixing an event within a match, go back to the early Spring of 2001. Since then the Unit's work, together with that of the ICC and its individual member cricket boards supported by reports from our contacts around the world, have combined to allow us to say that we have no concerns about any of the international matches that have been played during the last 12 months. Consequently, we are confident that for the past 12 months international cricket has been free of corruption. It is the first time cricket has been able to say that for, probably, 20 years.

Of course, the most important test of the success of the Unit's work is the question of whether we and the ICC have put a stop to corruption. And the answer is - at the moment yes, but we will all need to be vigilant and to work hard to keep the game corruption free.

What, then, is the current role of the ACU within international cricket?

The remaining challenges for us, the ICC and indeed everyone concerned with the world game are, firstly, how to keep the game clean in the future and, secondly, to consider what we must still do about past events.

Take the issue of those past events. We are still involved in supporting criminal investigations in India and South Africa and we continue to work with the police in the UK. We play a critical role in brining together the legal authorities in India and South Africa, and we will be doing further work by taking the South African police to India sometime this summer in an operation largely, but not exclusively, related to the Hansie Cronje affair.

It would be wrong to think that all the events of the past are done and dusted -- there are still things that could emerge, and the potential for criminal prosecutions to arise out of past events.

We've also, this past year, supported Mr Justice Bhandari, the Pakistani judge, who has been looking into events from the 1999 World Cup, specifically two matches involving the Pakistan team. We know he has reported his findings to the Pakistan government, and we await the outcome of his report.

We have, of course, carried out our own investigations into what went on in the past, and are continuing to do that. We have not totally drawn a line under these events, but our work now is mostly in support of on-going criminal investigations and judicial enquiries.

Consequently, most of our effort this past year has been spent on looking forward, keeping the game clean, and broadly supporting the ICC by putting in place the recommendations of my report of last year. In short, it has been about using prevention as the cure.

In what specific areas has your prevention work been carried out?

It has fallen into three main chunks: education, physical security, and the appointment of security personnel.

In terms of education, we started with the younger players in world cricket. We wanted to brief them and warn them about what to look for, how they might be approached and seduced into corruption. All 16 teams and officials at the ICC Under-19 World Cup in New Zealand in January were fully briefed by this unit. Jeff Rees actually did much of that work and it proved to be a very worthwhile exercise. Most of the youngsters were surprised, even horrified, at what we were telling them - as were the management's of both the developing countries and the main countries. That trip was very important in terms of establishing a relationship with young players.

We also carried out a similar briefing exercise at the ICC Six Nations Challenge in Namibia -- a tournament at which the competing teams were the host country, plus Kenya, Holland, Canada and the A teams from both Sri Lanka and Zimbabwe.

Of the full Test sides, we have briefed six and have four to go. That process will be completed by this September's ICC Champions Trophy event in Sri Lanka, at the latest.

To reinforce our education process, I have also recommended that a professional video be made about corruption, together with some related literature. It is planned to launch the video at this year's annual conference, and we're very pleased that it features players of the stature of Steve Waugh, Sachin Tendulkar and Shaun Pollock pledging their support for the anti-corruption campaign. So, as you can see, a lot of work has been done during this past year on developing the education program and also delivering it.

Can you outline in detail the work the Unit has done in the area of physical security?

I expressed concern in my report last year about what has happened in the past at the fringe tournaments in places like Sharjah, where history tells us that a lot of the bad relationships developed.

So, the stark choice for the ICC was to make Sharjah and other such venues complete no-go areas for international cricket, or work with the authorities in those places to make sure corruption did not take place there. Our view, and I am sure it was the right view, was to work with the authorities in these venues.

In fairness to the officials in Sharjah, for instance, they could not have been more co-operative during the past 12 months. The chief executive there, and the chairman, invited us to help them reorganise the security. We have subsequently put a lot o effort into Sharjah -- we gave them detailed recommendations on how they could improve the physical security and the operational situation there.

Our ambition, without making it intrusive to the player or supporters, was to make it far harder for the corruptors to carry out the sort of activity they had in the past. That included installing a small number of closed-circuit TV cameras, and establishing better control of access to the dressing rooms and players' areas. We also actually encouraged the Sharjah authorities to brick up one of the doors that led into the back of the dressing room, because history had showed us that it had been widely used as a back way into the players' area for undesirable characters!

Sharjah have since implemented every single recommendation that we made, which is to their great credit. We then thought it would be important to reinforce our recommendations with a presence, as a test of those new procedures. So we have attended each tournament that has been staged there since -- the triangular tournament of October 2001 and both the triangular one-day tournament of April and the rescheduled Test matches between Pakistan and West Indies.

Again, despite some initial concerns, we could not have had better co-operation from all the teams, the managers, and the administrators at Sharjah. We all learned lessons, but I think that overall we managed to get the balance between monitoring and not being too intrusive just about right. I think the players recognised that things had been a bit too lax in the past. I think we brought some sensible discipline to the arrangements and security there, and the lessons we've learned in Sharjah -- like the identification of minimum standards for security -- have now been adopted in principle by the ICC as the minimum standards to be applied right across the board of official Test and one-day internationals. This strategy was discussed by the ICC's Executive Board in Cape Town in March, and further discussions about implementation will take place in London in June.

What is the thinking behind the appointment of regional security managers?

I have from the start of this exercise recommended them as an ideal way of taking things forward. Initially, when I was brought in by the ICC to head up the Anti-Corruption Unit, my main helpers were people I knew from my time in the British police force. But my ambition was always to recruit security personnel from the respective cultures and countries that make up world cricket. So it was important to recruit regional security managers, five of whom have recently been appointed. Very good ex-police officers have been recruited for the Australia/New Zealand region, the South Africa/Zimbabwe/Africa region and West Indies/England. India and Sri Lanka now have as their regional security manager -- someone who was actually one of the CBI officers who previously worked on cricket corruption, while the remaining region Pakistan/Bangladesh also has a high-calibre man appointed to them.

Now, rather than our operation being seen as merely an Anti-Corruption Unit, we have become a dedicated security unit which concerns itself with a range of issues, and brings cricket into line with other main global sports.

After the World Cup, we will see the small central unit and the regional security officers acting together as an overall ICC security unit, to ensure the game remains clean of corruption.

What have you been doing, specifically, in preparation for the 2003 ICC Cricket World Cup?

The South African government formed a Security Directorate to cover all the security and planning for the World Cup, and we were asked to work on that body. We were very happy to do so, and I have been regularly in South Africa during the past year in order to advice that unit.

We are approaching our part in the preparations in three sections. The first is to audit and survey all the World Cup stadia, and give specific advice about how the South Africans should approach security in those venues; the second is to provide the South African authorities with up-to-date intelligence about who we think will try to target the World Cup in terms of corruption.

We are liaising with the Indian police in particular about who currently are the most active corruptors, and about who will try to travel to South Africa, or simply try to disrupt or fix matches. We will then either stop them from travelling to South Africa, or we will put them under close scrutiny when they get there.

In essence, if you are someone thinking about targeting the World Cup, I would recommend doing something else with your life in those few weeks because we're on the case. That's our message, and it is a very serious one.

Thirdly, we will also have a permanent presence in South Africa from December right through to the end of the World Cup, so that we can continue to work very closely with the South African authorities.

Because we have kept the game clean for the past 12 months, our view now is that there are a lot of very frustrated fixers out there who are losing money!

They won't go away in the short term, and as we say in our video, we think that every one-day international played attracts a minimum of something in the region of US$ 150 million in betting on the unofficial market alone.

Will this September's ICC Champions Trophy event in Sri Lanka act as a kind of `dummy run' for you, in terms of your World Cup preparation?

Yes, this is another important event for us in the run-up to the World Cup. All 10 Test sides will be there, so we will have a heavy presence, and we are already working very hard with the Sri Lankan authorities to get our security in place. In short, the ICC Champions Trophy and the 2003 ICC Cricket World Cup are two very big tests both for us and the ICC. The fixers would love to be able to get into these two events, simply because of the huge sums of betting money that they are certain to attract.

In conclusion, how do you assess the current state of play in terms of the anti-corruption campaign?

It was right for the ICC to set up an Anti-Corruption Unit at the start of this process, but it is equally right now for the game to have its own general security unit. Indeed, this is the function we are now fulfilling more and more. We have also evolved from playing catch-up, which was the situation initially, to going forward in a confident manner. It has been a demanding job, but also a very satisfying one because of the way we have got on top of the situation, and because we have had such strong support from the ICC itself and all areas of the game.

I'm very confident about the future, up to and beyond the World Cup. In fact, there are some other world sports who have told us that they are watching with great interest what we are doing.

In the 1960's and 1970's it was performance-enhancing drugs that were seen as being on the margins of sport, but suddenly that became a huge challenge for all sports to address. Similarly, I think betting corruption emerged in the 1990's as another new challenge for world sport. I believe, however, that cricket has been mature enough and big enough to face up to its past, and take a led in sorting this issue out. I think cricket can be proud of what it has achieved in the field of anti-corruption. The main challenge now is to work hard to keep the game clean and not allow the corruptors, who remain a threat, to regain an influence in world cricket.

Courtesy: ICC annual report and accounts - 2001/02