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at BBCworldservice.com slash podcasts. If you were to invent a sport that was tailor-made for match fixing, the sport that you would

invent would be called tennis.

It's the story all of tennis is talking about, revelations of suspected match fixing in the sport.

We thought somewhere in the region of 10 players was the core of the problem.

Thirteen. In Chennai, they offered me 50,000 in Paris they offered me double money and also a bigger

amount than fifty50,000 in Moscow.

I'm Simon Cox and on assignment here on the BBC World Service,

this week I'm investigating a story that's taken me six years to tell.

It starts back in 2009 when I was meeting a source here in Central London

and found out about a confidential investigation linking top tennis players to

suspected match fixes. And that set me going. After years of digging though, what

I'd almost given up hope, working with the American website

Buzzfeed News, a whistleblower passed us a cache of secret documents which tell

for the first time the inside story of how tennis kept secret the extent of players

suspected to be fixing matches.

The story begins in August 2007 in Sopot, a pretty coastal town in Poland with an annual tennis tournament that was so low key there's no video archive or even images of it. In the second round the

Russian world number four player Nikolai Davodenko was taking on the

Argentinian Martin Vassalo Arguello, ranked way below him. Normally such a match would attract modest

gambling, but at the global betting exchange Betfair, alarm bells rang when they saw over

four million dollars placed on the match.

...