Sport must stop giving easy cover to billionaire fraudsters

What did Texan-born billionaire R. Allen Stanford know about cricket? The game is famously impenetrable to everyone outside of its English, Australian, Indian and Caribbean heartlands. It would be hard to imagine anything less Texan than a slow, genteel contest, where dress codes and tea breaks are as important as the score itself.

And yet Stanford turns out to have been a major sponsor of the sport, muscling into the limelight as a promoter and champion. Now that he has been accused by the US Securities and Exchange Commission of running a "massive, ongoing fraud," he has caused huge embarrassment to the England and Wales Cricket Board, one of the recipients of his boundless generosity.

It isn't the first time a questionable company or tycoon has been a big sponsor of sporting events. In reality, too many sports organizations have allowed themselves to become a front for flimsy, over-ambitious types. While money and sports will always work together, the point has been reached where many sports are effectively colluding with get-rich-quick businessmen.