The England and Wales Cricket Board is planning to review a payment of £1.75m from Yorkshire to a company controlled by their chief executive, Sanjay Patel, for consultancy work relating to the Hundred sale.

The club’s 2025 accounts, which were circulated to members last month, show that Patel’s company SMP73 Ltd received a commission of £1.75m last year for “corporate broker services in connection with the sale of Northern Superchargers Limited”. Patel was one of the key architects of the Hundred in his previous role at the ECB and was among a small group of executives who received bonuses worth a combined £2.1m in 2022.

The ECB is understood to have been alerted last week to the payment from Yorkshire, which was made last year, and has decided to review it to determine if any regulations were breached. A formal investigation has not been launched at this stage, but the ECB could decide to refer the matter to the Cricket Regulator, the body that polices governance and discipline across the sport.

Yorkshire received about £60m from the £100m sale of Northern Superchargers to the Indian media conglomerate the Sun Group last year, as the only county to sell all of their Hundred franchise. The club banked about £40m from selling their 51% stake in the franchise and another £20m from their share of the 49% stake sold by the ECB, with the rest distributed to non-Hundred counties and the wider game.

Yorkshire’s accounts state that SMP73’s work for the club concluded “prior to his [Patel’s] appointment as the club’s chief executive officer” in October 2025, but the 53-year-old had already been an influential figure at Headingley for 18 months by that stage, having been made a nonexecutive director in February 2024 and subsequently appointed interim chief executive in September 2024.

The accounts also confirm that SMP73, whose sole director is Patel, were engaged by Yorkshire in 2025. Records at Companies House show he also owns more than 75% of SMP73’s shares and has more than 75% of its voting rights.

Yorkshire sources said that Patel was not employed by them when the arrangements relating to the payment were entered into. They added that Patel was engaged as a consultant with a strict remit, which included brokering the sale of the Hundred franchise, with the £100m valuation far exceeding the targets required to trigger the commission payment.

After Yorkshire’s accounts were published last month details of the payment were identified in a Substack post from the cricket finance blogger Richard Bentley.

Yorkshire have received larger dividends from the Hundred sale than any other county, partly due to the club’s decision to sell their 51% stake, but also because the terms of the ECB’s financial distribution benefit counties carrying large debts. Before the Hundred auction the club owed more than £25m to the family trust of their chair, Colin Graves, which has now been repaid in full.

As a result of such debts and cashflow problems Yorkshire have faced the threat of bankruptcy in recent years and without the ECB advancing the club central funding would have been unable to pay their players towards the end of the 2024 domestic season.

In addition to financial difficulties, Yorkshire have experienced disciplinary problems and were fined £400,000 and handed a 48-point deduction in the County Championship three years ago after being found guilty of racism and discrimination in relation to complaints made by their former spin bowler Azeem Rafiq.

In addition the former deputy chair Phillip Hodson was fined £1,000 and given a reprimand by the ECB’s cricket discipline panel last summer after jokes made at an after-dinner speech in Scarborough were found to have breached anti-discrimination regulations. As Hodson had left the club, however, Yorkshire were not charged.

Before joining Yorkshire, Patel was a senior executive at the ECB, where he spent nine years. As the ECB’s chief commercial officer, Patel was one of the architects of the Hundred, and served as the new competition’s first managing director for almost five years from 2019.

Patel was one of a small group of executives who received bonuses of about £2.1m in 2022, although the ECB said at the time that the payout was not directly linked to the Hundred, describing it as “a retention tool for key senior leaders”.

The ECB declined to comment.