What new criminal law changes
Australia and Kenya both criminalised competition manipulation in August, and the consequence for a federation is disclosure rather than deterrence.
Two legislatures, two days apart
On 19 August 2026 Kenya's National Assembly passed the Sports (Amendment) Bill, 2026, criminalising the manipulation of sporting competitions. During passage, members raised the maximum fine from KSh 1 million to KSh 10 million, or three times the value involved, whichever is higher. The Bill also provides for imprisonment of up to one year, match forfeiture, exclusion, lifetime bans and forfeiture of gains. It is awaiting presidential assent.
On 20 August 2026 the Australian Government introduced the Criminal Code Amendment (National Sport Integrity Offences) Bill 2026. It creates federal offences of corruption of a sporting event, inducing or soliciting corruption of a sporting event, improper handling of information about such conduct, and offences relating to inside information. The maximum penalty is 10 years' imprisonment. The Government framed the Bill as a step towards Australian ratification of the Macolin Convention, which Australia was the first non-European state to sign.
The Attorney-General, Michelle Rowland, put the purpose plainly: "There's no place in Australia for match-fixing or conduct that seeks to undermine the integrity of our sporting events."
Both instruments will be read, understandably, as an increase in deterrence. That is the smaller half of the story. The larger half is what happens to a federation's own paperwork on the day a specific criminal offence exists.
The offence changes the status of your records
Before a specific offence exists, an internal integrity file is an administrative document. It supports a disciplinary process run by the organisation, under its own rules, at its own pace, with its own standard of proof. It can be incomplete. It can contain an analyst's speculation. It can sit in a personal inbox. Nobody outside the organisation is entitled to it.
Once manipulation is a criminal offence, that same file is potential evidence in a criminal proceeding. It becomes disclosable material. Investigators can seek it, prosecutors may need it and defence lawyers will test it. Its condition on the day it was created determines its value years later.
That shift lands on a small number of practical things.
Provenance. Who received the report, when, through what channel, and what state it was in. A report that arrives verbally and is written up from memory three weeks later has a different evidential weight from one captured at the point of contact.
Integrity of the record. Whether the file can be shown not to have been altered. Timestamps, version history and access logs are trivial to configure in advance and impossible to reconstruct afterwards.
Separation of fact from inference. An analyst's hypothesis and an observed fact must be distinguishable in the record. When they are not, the whole document becomes contestable, and the contest happens in public.
Retention. Criminal investigations start years after the conduct. A retention policy that deletes at 12 months destroys the case, lawfully and irreversibly.
Handling of the reporter. Australia's Bill includes an offence of improper handling of information about corruption of a sporting event. Once mishandling information is itself criminal, the way an organisation treats a report is no longer only a matter of internal policy.
Why the standard has to apply from day one
The temptation is to run an ordinary internal process and raise the standard if a matter becomes serious. That does not work, for a straightforward reason: you cannot tell which report is the serious one at the time it arrives.
An approach reported by one player in a lower division looks like an isolated conversation. It becomes significant when a second report arrives eight months later naming the same intermediary. It becomes significant again when a betting alert lands on a fixture involving the same club. Neither of those later events improves the record of the first, and the first is the one that establishes the pattern.
This is also why the reporting channel itself is a legal control rather than a piece of welfare provision. The EU whistleblower directive, Directive (EU) 2019/1937, sets out the shape: an internal reporting channel, acknowledgement within seven days, feedback within three months, confidentiality for the reporter and protection against retaliation. Those requirements were written for employment law reasons, and they happen to produce exactly the audit trail a prosecutor needs.
What Macolin actually asks for
The Macolin Convention, the Council of Europe Convention on the Manipulation of Sports Competitions, was adopted in 2014 and entered into force on 1 September 2019. It remains the only binding international treaty on the subject. It requires three things of the states that join: criminalisation of manipulation, a national platform that shares information between sport, betting regulators and law enforcement, and education and reporting duties inside sports organisations.
Take-up has been slow. A legal update published on 17 July 2026 by the firm Mishcon de Reya counted 43 signatories and 17 ratifications. Australia's Bill and Kenya's Bill both address the first of the three requirements. It is the one that needs a legislature, and therefore the one that takes longest.
The United Kingdom is at an earlier stage of the same process. It signed in December 2018 and has not ratified. The Government laid the Convention before Parliament on 4 June 2026, opening treaty scrutiny with a deadline since extended to 12 October 2026. The House of Lords International Agreements Committee heard evidence on 9 and 14 July, and closed with a departmental session on 21 July. At that session the Department for Culture, Media and Sport's Director of Sport and Gambling, Emma Floyd, reported 28% more corruption instances in 2025 than in 2024. Evidence across the sessions covered the lower tiers of football and tennis being targeted by international criminal networks, and manipulation in darts, chess and skiing. The Committee's report has not been published.
Two other points of context are worth stating, because they are frequently assumed the other way. There was no new binding EU legislative instrument on match-fixing in 2026, and no US state enacted a law criminalising manipulation in 2026. US state legislative activity in 2026 was aimed at prediction markets, which is a different question.
The domestic layer moves too
Criminal law is not the only thing that changes a federation's obligations. In July 2026 Sport Integrity Australia issued updated National Integrity Framework policies covering competition manipulation, and sports have until 30 April 2027 to adopt them. That deadline is the one most Australian federations will actually feel, and it arrives before any prosecution under the new offences could conclude.
There is also a technology dimension that is easy to miss. Where an integrity system profiles named individuals, players, officials, agents or bettors, in ways that materially affect them, the EU AI Act's high-risk obligations are engaged. Regulation (EU) 2026/1744, the Digital Omnibus on AI, was published on 24 July 2026. It deferred the application date for stand-alone Annex III systems to 2 December 2027, and Annex I systems to 2 August 2028. The substantive requirements did not change, and the deferral was made because harmonised standards were not ready. The transparency and AI-content-labelling duties in Article 50 remained on 2 August 2026.
Those requirements, documentation, human oversight, data governance and logging, are the same disciplines that make a record disclosable-ready. No sector-specific published guidance exists on the use of AI in detecting competition manipulation or in risk-scoring individuals. Not from the Council of Europe, not from the Macolin bodies, and not from any of the monitoring organisations. Federations building these systems are applying general law to a specific problem without a map.
What to do before assent
Audit your reporting route as if it will be disclosed. Who receives a report, in what system, with what timestamp, and who can edit it afterwards.
Set a retention period measured in years, not months. Then check that it survives a staff change and a platform migration.
Separate the investigative file from the disciplinary file. One may end up with a prosecutor. The other must satisfy your own tribunal. They have different requirements and should not be the same document.
Decide now who speaks to law enforcement. A named person, a defined threshold for referral, and legal advice available before the first call rather than after it.
Read Australia's information-handling offence carefully. An organisation that sits on a report, or that discloses a reporter's identity, may be doing more than breaching its own policy.
Watch for presidential assent in Kenya, for the passage and commencement of the Australian Bill, and for the Lords committee report before 12 October. Whichever way those land, the work of getting your own records to an evidential standard is worth doing, and it is entirely within your control.
Sources
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