Darren Williams makes another attempt to regain jockey's licence

The jockey Darren Williams, banned for three months last year for passing inside information to a banned person, is making another attempt to recover his licence, having been rebuffed in the autumn. Williams, who was one of Kieren Fallon's co-defendants in the collapsed race-fixing trial in 2007, is frustrated by how long the process is taking. "I applied eight weeks ago," he said today, "but they [the British Horseracing Authority] have been dragging their heels over it. Eventually, I got a date for an interview, for 14 July [yesterday] but then, the week before, they rang me and cancelled it, I presume because of the Harry Findlay case." Findlay's appeal against a six-month ban was heard at the BHA's offices yesterday. It is now four years since Williams first lost his licence, when he was charged by the City of London police with conspiracy to defraud punters. A judge at the Old Bailey eventually ruled that he had no case to answer and he recovered his licence the following month, in January 2008. However, a BHA disciplinary panel, relying on evidence from the trial, ruled in the middle of last year that Williams had passed inside information to the former owner Miles Rodgers during 2004, when Rodgers was a banned person. The panel banned Williams for three months from June 2009. Williams had assumed he would be able to recover his licence in September and was stunned to find that the BHA opposed his application when it came before the licensing committee. The committee turned him away, saying "he does not have presently the necessary integrity, reliability and commitment to the rules of racing". Now, Williams will have a second attempt at persuading the committee that he is a fit and proper person to hold a licence. "I can't understand why I couldn't get it back," he says. Given the committee's familiarity with his case, the process will be confined to his application and an interview. When he applied last autumn, he was also asked to provide character references from racing professionals, which he got from the trainers Peter Hiatt, John Norton and Derek Shaw. Although he has no British licence, Williams is not barred from seeking to ride elsewhere and he spent the winter competing in Bahrain and Qatar, where his fellow jockeys included John Egan, Gary Hind and Tyrone Williams, all of whom used to be based in Britain. "It's very competitive out there," he said. "They've got some lovely horses and the prize money is fantastic. I'm going back in September. "I rode plenty of winners out there. I've been riding out for John Weymes and Tom Dascombe since then, trying to keep fit, but I was pretty fit when I came back." The trainer Karl Burke, who has been Williams' main employer over the past five years, is also hoping to recover his licence, having been banned for a year for passing inside information to Rodgers. His ban expires at midnight on July 27, in a fortnight's time. Of his licence application, Burke said: "It's in the hands of my solicitors at the moment but I see no reason why they wouldn't grant it. I've served my time." "It's not been a nice experience for me but it's probably been worse for my family," he added, explaining that he had been barred from living at the family home for so long as it remained a racing yard, as it did for the first three months of his ban. His father-in-law, Alan Jarvis, kept the yard running until the end of the last Flat turf season. Burke cannot be sure how many horses he will have to train, assuming he is allowed to open his gates once more. "Obviously, I can't have any contact with owners [during the ban], so it's a bit of a Catch-22 and there's not a lot I can say about that until the end of the month. But at the time I was banned, all the owners bar none said they would support me when I came back and hopefully that remains the case."