Scudamore slams West Ham´s Tevez conduct

English Premier League chief executive Richard Scudamore has hit out at West Ham United for their dishonesty during the Carlos Tevez saga.

The striker moved to Upton Park in August 2006 along with fellow Argentine Javier Mascherano in a transfer that was eventually found to have broken regulations regarding third-party ownership.

The players’ contracts, then partly owned by agent Kia Joorabchian’s business Media Sport Investment, saw the east London club receive only a small portion of the fee when they moved on.

And Scudamore has now blasted the club’s previous executives for lying to him.

“It is quite simple – you are completely undone by an act of bad faith,” he told Bloomberg in a TV interview.

“If a club, through its executives, chooses to lie straight to your face, there is a great deal of damage that can be done from that.

“Ultimately, the Tevez saga goes down to people not being honest. With any regularity body, if people are not honest there is very little you can do about it and that is why the whole thing unravelled.

“It ranks up there as the number one act of bad faith that any club has ever done towards me during my time here. After that, it was dealt with under our rule book and the rest is history.”

Despite West Ham’s five-and-a-half-million-pound fine being labelled lenient in some quarters at the time, Scudamore believes the amount was significant, especially compared to other punishments meted out by governing bodies.

“When you consider what certain Football Associations get fined for racist abuse in Europe, 5.5 million pounds is a huge fine,” he said.

“Our rules say that if you break them then a commission hears the case and decides. We are glad English football has stopped these transactions happening.”