LONDON: Two tennis umpires have been banned for corruption and four more are currently suspended while under investigation, the International Tennis Feder­ation announced on Tuesday.

Kirill Parfenov of Kazakhstan was banned for life in February 2015 for contacting another official in a bid to “manipulate the scoring of matches”, the ITF said in a joint-statement with the Tennis Integrity Unit (TIU).

Croatia’s Denis Pitner was suspended for a year last August after passing on information about a player’s fitness to a coach and accessing a betting account that was used to place bets on tennis matches.

Confirming a story broken by the Guardian, the ITF and TIU said: “Kirill Parfenov of Kazakhstan was de-certified for life in February 2015 for contacting another official on Facebook.

“Separately, Denis Pitner of Croatia had his certification suspended on Aug 1, 2015 for 12 months for sending information on the physical well-being of a player to a coach during a tournament and regularly logging on to a betting account from which bets were placed on tennis matches.”

The Guardian story follows allegations about elite-level match-fixing made by the BBC and BuzzFeed shortly before start of the Australian Open last month.

An independent review into anti-corruption measures was announced, to be overseen by the TIU.

The ITF and TIU also confirmed that four other umpires have been suspended pending investigation by the TIU. “In order to ensure no prejudice of any future hearing we cannot publicly disclose the nature or detail of those investigations,” the two organisations said.

Published in Dawn, February 10th, 2016