FALLON CASE: BetFair lawyer David O’Reilly is not the man… to say the least.
Chris F. Masse December 8th, 2007
[...] In part, the fault is Betfair’s, for failing to ensure that police investigators understood the meaning of the complex evidence they provided, and for passing pages of irrelevant data to the Crown that provided one of many early embarrassments for the prosecution. [...]
The senior detective in charge of the investigation, Mark Manning, had met [Betfair lawyer David O'Reilly] at Betfair’s offices earlier that year [in 2004]. Manning left with a fundamental misunderstanding - that Rodgers had made a net profit of £2m from his betting activities, when in fact this was the total amount that had been risked. By the time the trial began, it had become clear that the accounts controlled by Rodgers had in fact made a net loss of more than £250,000 on the 27 races investigated.
Betfair provided more than 300 pages of data in evidence, showing the betting activities of Rodgers’ accounts on these 27 races. O’Reilly, the first witness called, claimed in court that this data showed how Rodgers would take bets on certain horses at much bigger odds than were being offered by anyone else. Under cross-examination, however, O’Reilly was led to the realisation that the Betfair data for eight of the 27 races included details of bets made after the race had started, at which point larger odds could be justified by mid-race developments. Observers were shocked that Betfair could have made such a blunder in handling its own data.
The father of one of the accused (and now cleared) jockey:
The man from Betfair admitted at the start of the trial he had misled police as to the amounts that had been gambled and then they brought in an expert witness from Australia [Ray Murrihy, Racing NSW's chief steward] who doesn’t know how things work here [in the U.K.].
Fallon trial at a glance
[Good recap.]
The case highlighted the difficulty of proving, forensically and legally, that a jockey has tried and succeeded in stopping a horse from winning.
Exactly.
BetFair’s co-founder Andrew Black’s empty comment.
Previously: There are a bunch of bozos at BetFair, in the anti-fraud and legal departments, apparently.
NEXT: Do sports prediction markets corrupt sport? No.
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[...] second point was very clear during the trial, and the media reported, at the time, that BetFair didn’t do a good job in making sure that the Police would understand all the facts and…. Below are the media excerpts that make that [...]