Racing’s ruling body has committed to publishing a review of the way its disciplinary panel works and expects to do so in September. The news follows criticism of the British Horseracing Authority over a lack of openness in the way it has responded to the Matthew Lohn debacle.
This latest of several BHA reviews was announced in March as the result of the integrity review and increased enormously in significance the following month, when it emerged that Lohn had been paid to advise the BHA while also chairing its disciplinary panels. That raised an appearance of bias which led to the quashing of two guilty verdicts against trainers and may yet lead to similar outcomes in seven other cases.
Following a series of embarrassing revelations, the BHA announced last month that the review would be chaired by an independent person, Christopher Quinlan QC, described as a leading expert in sports governance and regulation. At the same time, it announced that Ian Mill QC would review past cases chaired by Lohn but that review has not been published and the BHA received a lot of flak in the past fortnight for claiming privilege over the contents of Mill’s report.
A different approach will be taken with Quinlan’s findings, it has now been confirmed. “The report will be put before the BHA board on 13 September and later published in full, alongside any comments from the board, before the end of September,” said Robin Mounsey, a BHA spokesman.
It will not escape the notice of the BHA’s critics that the QC-led review of its past actions, which might have been mortifying, has been kept private while the QC-led review of how things should change for the future, with less obvious potential for embarrassment, will be disclosed. BHA officials claim that Mill’s work was never intended for publication, consisting of privileged legal advice about the regulator’s obligations in relation to a handful of past cases.
They maintain that a report on the BHA failings that led to the quashing of recent cases will be published in due course, but insist it will not be released or even written until the end of the rehearing of the case against the trainer Jim Best. Best’s lawyers maintain that, for the rehearing to be fair, that report should be released beforehand.
Quinlan has been charged with a review of the structure, composition and processes of the BHA’s disciplinary panel, licensing committee and appeal board. It is part of his brief to consider what changes might be necessary to ensure that proceedings before those bodies “comply with the highest standards of procedural fairness”.
He is also to review the relationship between those bodies and the BHA executive, which would therefore take in the recent controversy over meetings between the BHA’s lawyers and members of the disciplinary panels, which are effectively between the prosecutors and judges of BHA cases.
The BHA has refused to publish minutes of those meetings or even to confirm the dates on which they have taken place and has declined to admit representatives of jockeys or trainers, arousing great suspicion thereby. The BHA view is that such meetings are “to discuss general matters of procedure” and do not require broader attendance.
