LONDON, Oct 5: British horse racing authorities are to be accused of failing to stamp out “15 years of systematic corruption,” London’s Evening Standard newspaper said Friday.

An investigation on the BBC’s Panorama programme to be screened Sunday, will feature Roger Buffham, the ex-security chief of the sport’s regulating body, the Jockey Club.

He will claim: “A whole generation of National Hunt (jump) jockeys had close links with organised crime,” the Standard said.

Last month the Panorama programme won a court fight with the Jockey Club to use documents from Buffham, who left the Club last year.

In June it emerged that Brian Wright, a well known racing figure in Britain, had been alleged to have been at the centre of an international cocaine smuggling gang whose members featured in a series of trials which ended in long jail sentences.

An arrest warrant is still out for Wright but in the Panorama programme, former jockey Dermot Browne will describe how Wright allegedly fixed races by bribing “quite a few “jockeys.”

Browne will say that in a two-month spell in 1990, at Wright’s request he was involved in the doping of 27 horses.

Jockey Club officials have consistently insisted that the sport is properly run and monitored and fundamentally honest.

But it has pointed out that its ability to deal with criminal activity by outsiders remains limited because it lacks powers of search and seizure.

British horse racing is already reeling from another BBC TV programme broadcast in June when three trainers were each filmed covertly talking about the scope for a horse underperforming to secure a lower handicap mark.

The three men - Ferdy Murphy, Jamie Osborne and David Wintle - are to appear before the Jockey Club’s disciplinary committee charged with bringing the sport into disrepute. All three have said their remarks were taken out of context.—Reuters