French tennis player Quentin Folliot has been suspended for 20 years after breaching the Tennis Anti-Corruption Program (TACP) 27 times, the International Tennis Integrity Agency (ITIA) said Thursday.
Folliot, 26, was described as a “central figure in a network of players operating on behalf of a match-fixing syndicate,” and was fined $70,000 as well as being ordered to repay over $44,000 in payments he received for his actions. He was charged with 30 offenses, all of which he denied, spanning 11 matches between 2022 and 2024.
Folliot, who never played a full ATP Tour and competed on the second and third tiers of the professional tennis circuit, reached a career-high singles ranking of No. 488. Anti-corruption official Amani Khalifa described Folliot in her report as “a vector for a wider criminal syndicate, actively recruiting other players and attempting to embed corruption more deeply into the professional tours.”
Evidence submitted by the ITIA included screenshots of apparent exchanges between Folliot and match-fixers. The organization admitted that its contentions that some of the matches in question were fixed relied on circumstantial evidence, including financial transactions connected to but not directly involving Folliot, as well as suspicious activity alerts from betting platforms.
It also supplied evidence of conversations between Folliot and other players in which the 26-year-old persuaded or asked peers to influence the results of matches.
Folliot categorically denied all the claims against him, and described the ITIA’s case as based on “hypothesis” in his submissions upon being informed of the charges against him. In response to one of the allegations of match-fixing, he said that he had lost a match quickly because: “I was in a severe depression at that time. I wanted to quit tennis.
“I just went there to not get fined and just play my match, lose and go back homе. I know that is not good, but that is what happened.”
Five other players were probed during the investigation into the syndicate. Bouquet, Jaimée Floyd-Angele, Paul Valsecchi, Luc Fomba and Enzo Rimoli were all sanctioned, but Folliot’s ban, which will run until 2044 including credit for time served under a provisional suspension, is the longest.