Katie Simmonds: Integrity on the Sports Field

In this segment of the award-winning AML Now, John J. Byrne interviewed Katie Simmonds of the Sports Integrity Global Alliance (SIGA) and covered this new FATF-like organization created to address corruption and other problems facing sports around the globe.

Katie Simmonds is a member of the Executive Committee of ICSS EUROPE, headquartered in London. As director of Sports Governance and Financial Integrity, she manages several tough leadership projects in these fields, such as the Financial Integrity and Transparency in Sport (FITS) Project, an innovative initiative aimed at providing, for the first time ever, a holistic, fact-based, rigorous and neutral diagnosis of the current realities and threats facing financial integrity and transparency in sport. Simmonds was instrumental in coordinating and managing the FITS Football Study, from inception to delivery and played a key role in organizing the inaugural FITS FORUM—the expert-driven international conference in Geneva in September 2015 where leaders met to discuss the critical issues facing the financial integrity and transparency of sport.

Simmonds is also involved in the development of the Sport Integrity Global Alliance (SIGA), an independent and neutral coalition of global leaders in sport, government and business. She also administers the ICSS EUROPE's Task Forces on Good Governance and Financial Integrity and Sport and Youth Policy.

Simmonds is also a director of the British Association for Sport and the Law (BASL) and a member of Women in Football. She is a qualified solicitor in England and Wales, and prior to joining ICSS EUROPE, she practiced sports law in private practice as a senior associate at a leading global law firm. In addition, she was a partner at a boutique Mayfair practice where she generated her own sports clients, advising leading international brands, leagues, clubs and athletes on a variety of contentious and non-contentious matters.

Simmonds was the first registered female rugby league and rugby union agent. She was previously the first female Chairperson of the Royal National Lifeboat Institute’s Leeds Business Branch and a Trustee of the Diane Modahl Sports Foundation. She practices sport every day and has run two London Marathons.