James Crickmore excluded again

One of the darkest disciplinary cases in British racing this century has its latest (unusually short) chapter
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Peter Scargill
Deputy industry editor
Hearing moves to BHA offices in London on Thursday
BHA: added James Robert Crickmore to its exclusion list for four months in December
The reference was easy to miss – and not just because it came at a time when most of us had Christmas on our minds.

On December 14, James Robert Crickmore of Chesterton, Cambridgeshire, was added to the BHA’s exclusion list for four months – the very day his previous disqualification had ended – with a short explanation simply stating this was “by order of the disciplinary officer”.

The name might not be immediately familiar to many but this was in fact the latest chapter in one of British racing’s darkest disciplinary cases this century.

It was back in 2011 that Crickmore was disqualified for 14 years for his role in corrupting jockeys to ride horses owned by him, and his business associate Maurice Sines, to purposefully lose. Crickmore, Sines and a cabal of conspirators profited from the deceit, having laid their horses on the betting exchange Betfair.

A number of jockeys were banned from racing for passing on inside information for reward and, in the cases of Greg Fairley and Paul Doe, for ensuring the horses they rode did not win. They both received 12-year bans, which marked a particularly significant fall from grace for Fairley, who had been champion apprentice in 2007 and claimed a Group 1 in Germany for trainer Mark Johnston on the Kirsten Rausing-owned Lady Jane Digby in 2010.

Another jockey, Kirsty Milczarek, was later successful in her appeal against a two-year disqualification and her removal from the process resulted in Crickmore and Sines having their bans reduced to 13 years each.

As well as corrupting riders, Crickmore and Sines were found to have engaged in deliberately hiding their ownership of It’s A Mans World on two occasions. The disciplinary panel determined this was done to allow them to lay the horse, Crickmore and Sines believing it would prevent them being investigated when doing so.

Since his ban came into force, Crickmore has grown to be a wealthy man through his companies running caravan and park home sites. However, alongside Sines, who is now known as Fred Doe having changed his name by deed poll, he has been in the headlines for other reasons.

Crickmore and Sines were fined £1,000 in 2013 for “bullying” residents at a park home site on the Isle Of Wight, while they were also fined in 2021 for inadvertently breaching a court order and building homes on greenbelt land in Essex.

Alongside these infractions, Crickmore was named in the media as part of two much larger stories: for his role in the downfall of pre-fab dwellings billionaire Robert Bull, and his alleged links to the Kinahan Organised Crime Group (KOCG).

Greg Fairley: received 12-year ban as part of the case
Greg Fairley: received a 12-year ban
Credit: David Dew
In 2016, Crickmore was named in High Court proceedings as being an associate of the Kinahans, a multi-national drugs smuggling and money laundering operation originally based in Dublin, after attending the funeral of David Byrne, a member of the crime group who was shot and killed as part of a gangland feud during a boxing weigh-in at the Regency Hotel in the Irish capital.

Two years later, it was alleged he was identified as being associated with Liam Byrne and Thomas ‘Bomber’ Kavanagh, who ran the British arm of the Kinahans’ operation. Last year, Byrne was jailed for five years, while Kavanagh is serving a 21-year prison sentence.

As well as Crickmore’s involvement in racing, rumours of Kinahan’s involvement in the sport have persisted, although not been proven, in the years since the Regency shooting. Daniel Kinahan, the son of KOCG founder Christy Kinahan and a member of the cartel, may be best known for his time acting as fight promoter for former heavyweight champion boxer Tyson Fury, but he first became known to the public when named during Kieren Fallon’s High Court race-fixing trial in 2007.

Crickmore was in the headlines again in 2023 when he and Sines/Doe called in debts owed to them by Bull and his RoyaleLife group. The move precipitated a run on Bull’s companies as other lenders sought to make sure they got paid too.

Ultimately, Bull, who made his fortune building prefabricated bungalows for retirement communities and, according to the Sunday Time Rich List, was worth £1.9 billion prior to the debts being called in, was declared bankrupt later the same year with debts of £725 million.

Back to the present, and Sines/Doe and Crickmore served the final months of their bans from racing in 2024, with the disqualifications ending on December 14. For Crickmore, the reprieve was fleeting as he immediately became an excluded person.

According to the BHA’s website, an individual is added to the exclusion list “in instances where a person’s presence on premises licensed by the BHA, or association with racing’s participants, is undesirable in the interests of racing based on their conduct”.

The vagueness of the reasoning for Crickmore’s latest exclusion is rare. A search of the exclusion list shows no other person has been added to it for the same reason as Crickmore in the last five years. The list goes back before 2020, but there are no reasons attached to those entries.

When asked for further information on the decision, a spokesman for the BHA said the authority “does not comment on investigations or on speculation surrounding potential investigations”.

The length of the latest exclusion, which expires on April 14, suggests the BHA must expect any investigation into Crickmore to be concluded in fairly short order, at which point it will be critical that far more details are forthcoming. Given the breadth of Crickmore’s corrupting influence prior to his exclusion, the sport will need reassurances that history will not repeat itself should he be allowed back into it.

Either way, it is a case that warrants the closest scrutiny over the coming months.