Enrique López Pérez, suspended eight years for fixing matches

Enrique López Pérez, was suspended for eight years this Tuesday by the Tennis Integrity Unit (TIU for its acronym in English) after being found guilty of fixing matches in at least three cases during 2017. The 29-year-old tennis player from Madrid and currently unranked was already removed from the activity on December 19, 2019 while these events were being investigated. And on July 24 of this year, the TIU opened a disciplinary file and maintained the temporary suspension. A month earlier, the Court of Instruction Number 5 of Madrid investigated the process and the judge declared him dismissed and López Pérez was found innocent due to lack of evidence.

“This fact is nonsense, but above all it is an abuse of my most basic fundamental rights and, therefore, it will be denounced before the Spanish courts and appealed immediately before the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) “, he wrote in a document that he provided to the website Punto de Break.” That case with the same evidence was filed with respect to me in July 2020, being innocent of the crimes of match fixing at the discretion of both the Prosecutor and the Judge “, insists in a note sent this Tuesday to EFE. “Therefore, the suspension carried out by the tennis authorities through referee Richard McLaren is completely illegal, since it directly contradicts the courts and the Spanish prosecutor's office in their interpretation of the same evidence, violating my fundamental rights and judging the same facts with different criteria twice. ” “For this reason, actions have been initiated before the CAS and before the Spanish courts themselves against an unprecedented outrage in the sports sector, since a federation has never ignored what a State Criminal Judge has ruled when evaluating facts to punish any of its members “, the text concludes.

The official of the anti-corruption hearing, McLaren, famous for uncovering the very serious case of consensual doping and even sponsored by the Government of Russia, was in charge of investigating López Pérez, and found that it violated the Tennis Anti-Corruption Program (TACP) rules three times in 2017 tournaments, with two other possible violations not proven. The player will also have to pay a fine of 25,000 dollars (almost 21,000 euros). Since December 1, 2020, the Spanish tennis player “is prohibited from playing or attending any tennis event authorized or sanctioned by the governing bodies of tennis for eight years,” according to the TIU statement. Enrique's violation of the TACP is listed in section D.1.d. from the 2017 code: “No covered person, directly or indirectly, will invent or attempt to invent the outcome or any other aspect of any event.”

A career that didn't take off

López Pérez, who had a higher ranking of 154 (08/13/2018) in singles and 135 in doubles (04/22/2019), last competed in a Challenger in Kobe (Japan) in November of last year and he has never played an ATP final. He also failed to get past the previous rounds at the Grand Slams, although he tried 17 times, the last one at the US Open in 2019. He has only played one match in the main draw of an ATP tournament, at Umag 2016, and lost it against Slovak Martin Klizan. If you hold multiple ITF titles and even a Challenger one, the one from Zhuhai in 2019. His official career earnings exceed $ 500,000 (417,000 euros).

In 2017, he chained several almost identical results with defeats in which favorable markers traced him in the qualys of Barcelona (2-6, 7-6 (4) and 6-3 against Santiago Giraldo), Estoril (3-6, 7-6 (0) and 6-4 against Bjorn Fratangelo) and Madrid (2- 6, 7-6 (2) and 6-2 against Borna Coric). In that season he had many different doubles pairs, including the Spanish Guillermo García-López and Roberto Carballés, although he played more regularly with the Argentine Marco Trungelliti.