The Tennis Integrity Unit has announced stringent match-fixing bans against the Italian pair Daniele Bracciali and Potito Starace, in what is expected to be the last word on a case that has dogged the sport for over a decade.

Bracciali – who returned to the court this year and won an ATP title in Kitzbuhel in August – has been banned for life and also fined $250,000, in a sentence that equals the heaviest ever handed down by the TIU. Starace received a 10-year ban and $100,000 fine.

The two players – who reached the 2012 French Open semi-final as a doubles partnership – were originally fined £35,700 between them and banned for a combined total of four-and-a-half months for making bets in 2005.

Then, in 2015, law-enforcement officers from the Italian city of Cremona brought further charges, based on intercepted phone and internet conversations. In a phone call with a businessman, Bracciali had supposedly discussed making €50,000 through deliberately losing sets, while Starace was alleged to have accepted illicit payments for losing to Pablo Andujar in Casablanca. In a confusing sequence of events, both men received life bans from the Italian Tennis Federation in 2015, only to have them rescinded on appeal two months later, although Bracciali still served a year’s ban.