The England and Wales Cricket Board intends to examine a payment of £1.75m made by Yorkshire to a firm controlled by chief executive Sanjay Patel in connection with consultancy services on the Hundred franchise sale.

Club accounts for 2025 circulated to members last month indicate that Patel's company SMP73 Ltd was paid a £1.75m commission for corporate broker services tied to the sale of Northern Superchargers Limited. Patel played a central role in developing the Hundred during his earlier ECB tenure and was part of a small executive group awarded combined bonuses of £2.1m in 2022.

The ECB learned of the Yorkshire payment last week and has chosen to review whether any rules were violated. No formal probe has started yet, though the ECB may refer the issue to the Cricket Regulator responsible for governance standards.

Yorkshire obtained roughly £60m from the £100m sale of Northern Superchargers to India's Sun Group last year as the sole county to divest its entire Hundred stake. The club secured about £40m from its 51 percent holding plus £20m from its portion of the ECB's 49 percent share, with remaining funds allocated to other counties.

Yorkshire records note that SMP73 completed its work before Patel's appointment as chief executive in October 2025, yet he had already served as a non-executive director from February 2024 and as interim chief executive from September 2024.

The accounts confirm SMP73, with Patel as sole director, was retained by Yorkshire in 2025. Companies House filings show Patel holds over 75 percent of shares and voting rights in the firm.

Yorkshire sources indicated Patel was not a club employee when payment terms were agreed. He was hired as a consultant with a focused brief to handle the franchise sale, and the £100m valuation surpassed thresholds needed for the commission.

Details of the payment surfaced in a Substack article by cricket finance writer Richard Bentley after the accounts appeared last month.

Yorkshire gained larger Hundred dividends than other counties due to selling its full stake and ECB distribution rules favoring indebted clubs. Before the auction the club owed over £25m to chair Colin Graves' family trust, a sum now fully repaid.

These debts and cashflow issues placed Yorkshire under bankruptcy risk in recent years, and without ECB advance funding the club could not have paid players by the close of the 2024 season.

Alongside financial strain, Yorkshire encountered disciplinary issues and received a £400,000 fine plus 48-point deduction in the County Championship three years ago for racism and discrimination linked to former spinner Azeem Rafiq's complaints.

Former deputy chair Phillip Hodson was also fined £1,000 and reprimanded by the ECB discipline panel last summer over jokes in a Scarborough after-dinner speech that breached anti-discrimination rules, though Yorkshire faced no charge as Hodson had departed.

Prior to Yorkshire, Patel spent nine years at the ECB as chief commercial officer and helped create the Hundred, serving as its first managing director from 2019 for nearly five years.

He was among executives receiving roughly £2.1m in 2022 bonuses, which the ECB described then as a retention measure rather than direct Hundred-linked pay.

The ECB declined to comment on the matter.