ICC ACU Anti-Corruption Workshop Leak 2026: Debate Decoded

The leak came in three slides. They were photographed at an oblique angle, suggesting a phone held under a desk, and they were sent to a cricket-business journalist on a Wednesday afternoon. By Friday, the slides were circulating in player WhatsApp groups, in board legal teams, and on a Reddit cricket-governance thread. The ICC's Anti-Corruption Unit (ACU) confirmed the slides were authentic, said they were a "training scenario," and asked everyone to please stop sharing them. The privacy row that followed is now a 2026 procedural rethink.

What the Slides Showed

The three slides were from an internal ACU education workshop run for board integrity officers. They listed, in scenario form, archetypal "handler" profiles — the agent, the friend, the journalist, the family member — and described how each archetype typically engages a target player. They included composite real-world examples drawn from previous investigations. Names were redacted. Roles, regions, and behavioural patterns were not.

The ACU's position is that the slides were teaching tools — a way to help integrity officers recognise approaches their players might be subjected to. The slides were not policy. They were not a watch-list. They were not a database. They were workshop material.

That is true. It is also true that workshop material containing composite-but-recognisable behavioural patterns about identifiable cricket-adjacent professions is, in 2026, a privacy-sensitive document. The leak forced the ACU to defend something that should not have ended up in a journalist's inbox.

The Privacy Concern

Three concerns, in order of seriousness:

• Composite identification risk: a composite scenario can be re-identified if it includes enough specifics. Two of the three slides included region, role, and approach pattern in combinations narrow enough to point readers at small candidate pools.
• Stigma without due process: workshop scenarios become circulated lore. People in the named roles — agents, journalists, family — get tarred without ever having been formally investigated.
• Defamation exposure: at least one role-and-region combination on the slides has triggered a legal letter from a sports-management firm.

The ACU has heard all three. The published response addresses the first two. The third is being managed quietly through legal channels.

What ACU Has Said

The ACU's on-record statement frames the slides as "internal training materials, never intended for external circulation, and not representative of any specific individuals." That is the standard line. It is also the line that does not satisfy the people who recognised themselves on the slides. The ACU has launched an internal review of how the workshop documentation is produced, distributed, and stored.

The Players' Position

Players have a paradoxical view here. On the one hand, they want robust anti-corruption protection — the ACU camera-room protocols and surveillance work are appreciated when they prevent approaches. On the other, they are uncomfortable with how broad-brush the educational framing has become. Composite handler profiles can suggest, by implication, that any agent or any journalist might be a corruption vector.

FICA has asked for two specific procedural changes:

• Workshop materials containing composite scenarios should be reviewed by an external privacy lawyer before circulation.
• The board integrity officer's notes should not include archetype labels that map to identifiable professions without explicit ACU sign-off.

Both are reasonable. Neither is currently in place.

The Comparable: Camera Room Protocols

The ACU has been here before, in a softer form. The 2019 row over ACU camera-room protocols — recording incoming and outgoing players in dressing-room corridors — was settled with a transparent published protocol and a player-feedback channel. The same template would work here. Workshop material gets a published-redaction process. Boards get clearer storage rules. Players get assurance that the educational content is not being repurposed.

What the IPL Does

The IPL anti-corruption code — the dressing-room phone restrictions, the dugout protocols, the team-meeting recording rules — has been more transparently published than the ICC workshop curriculum. That is partly because the IPL's anti-corruption work is BCCI-administered with franchise pressure for clear rules. Whatever the reason, the ICC could borrow the publishing model.

The Investigation Question

The ACU is investigating the leak itself. That is appropriate. The question is who had access to the slides and how the chain of custody broke. Workshop attendees were board integrity officers across roughly 15 nations. Slide handouts were physical, with no per-page watermarking. That is the procedural failure that allowed the photographs.

The fix — per-page watermarks, signed attendance acknowledgements, no physical distribution — has been used at corporate anti-corruption training for over a decade. The ACU not having it on a 2026 workshop is the procedural embarrassment.

Procedural control	Pre-leak	Post-leak (proposed)
Physical handouts	Yes	No
Per-attendee watermark	No	Yes
Digital-only PDFs	No	Yes
External privacy review	No	Yes
Composite scenario sign-off	No	Yes

What ICC Will Need To Decide

Three policy questions:

• Whether to retain composite handler scenarios in workshop curricula or replace them with abstracted typologies.
• Whether to publish a redacted public version of the workshop curriculum to remove the "hidden material" suspicion.
• Whether to give players (not just boards) a right to view the curriculum that informs the integrity-officer briefings about them.

The third is the most contested. The ACU's investigators view broader visibility as a leak risk. Players view restricted visibility as exactly the trust gap that this incident has revealed. There is a middle option — a player-rep observer at curriculum-development meetings — that has not been formally proposed but has been floated in FICA channels.

This is connected to the wider ICC ACU investigations cycle and the question of how much daylight is healthy for anti-corruption work.

What's Likely Next

Expect a public ACU statement on procedural reforms within the next 60 days, a redacted curriculum publication by year-end, and a quiet legal settlement on the defamation letter without admission of fault. Expect FICA to keep pushing on the player-visibility question. Expect the next workshop to be on a watermarked PDF.

The slides themselves were not malicious. The slides were not wrong. The slides were just educational material that should never have been circulated outside the room. The 2026 row is about how cricket's integrity machinery handles its own information hygiene. Quietly. Carefully. And, until last month, not very well.