Promoter Bob Arum says Daniel Kinahan is involved in 'nefarious activities of the worst kind'

Veteran boxing mogul Arum recently admitted he had paid millions to Kinahan for his role in arranging fights but claims he has now cut all ties with the Irish mafia boss.

In an interview last night, Arum was quizzed about why he had worked with Daniel Kinahan - despite it being known "by a lot of people that he was a very questionable individual.”

Arum claimed, again, that Kinahan had told him he was a reformed man.

“MTK - we did work with them.

"Kinahan had told us that while years ago he may have done things wrong, he was reformed and his involvement in boxing would demonstrate that he was reformed," Arum told FightHype.com.

“We have since learned that that isn't the case, at least as far as the US charges are concerned, which you take very seriously.

"He's continued to engage in nefarious activities of the worst kind, which is drug trafficking.

“So obviously we've had nothing to do with Kinahan and MTK for quite some time and indeed I began to suspect that something was wrong a number of months before the US government announcement.

“And hadn’t talked to Kinahan for a long time before the US announcement.”

Asked what he had suspected in the months beforehand, Arum refused to elaborate, saying only that he didn’t want “to go into all that”.

Moving onto the subject of Kinahan’s future in boxing, and if he will remain in the sport, Arum empathically said: “No, it’s finished, finished, finished.

“First of all, the UAE, where Dubai is, has seized all his funds and assets. I guess his offices are closed and MTK has announced that as of the end of this month they're out of business."

At the end of the FightHype.com interview Arum was asked about the role that crime figures have played in boxing and if Kinahan was not “the first of that kind of guy that had people had to deal with in this business and won’t be the last”.

Arum told the interviewer: “You're a young man. You don't remember how the mob guys controlled boxing for many years, in the 30s and 40s.”

And even after their activities were the subject of various investigations, “that really shined the light on it, there was still influences. I mean, they didn't just pack their bags and go away.

Arum recently revealed he had paid Kinahan more than $1 million for each of Fury’s four bouts against Tom Schwarz, Otto Wallin - as well as both of his fights with Deontay Wilder.

The 90-year-old Arum, who founded Top Rank promotion company in Las Vegas, acts as Fury's promoter in the US.

Arum recently said he will end all business dealings with the gangland boss in the wake of the extraordinary move by the US government to impose sanctions on the cartel.

“Kinahan called me and we had a long conversation,” Arum previously told Yahoo Sports.

“He has kids and he said he wanted to get out of that other stuff. He said to me, ‘Bob, I’ve done some bad things in my life. I admit that.

“But I’m not involved with that any more. I’m just trying to clean up my life and be a legitimate business man.’ I wasn’t involved in any of the things he might have done before and he was telling me he wasn’t doing anything.”

But Arum said the relationship started to change when Kinahan began to use bully tactics. At the same time he was hearing that Kinahan may still have been involved in questionable activities.

Asked if he stood over comments he made in June 2020, in which he described Daniel Kinahan as 'an honourable man', he says: "Well no.

"I can't talk, nor would I talk, about his dealings with us - but when my government makes a statement like they made, as a law abiding citizen of the United States, I have no other alternative but to abide by their determination".

Earlier this month, the management company, MTK, that was co-founded by Kinahan and former European champion Matthew Macklin in 2012, collapsed in the wake of sanctions imposed by the US government against Kinahan