SOCCER: The bank statements of football agents will be requisitioned by anti-corruption investigators as England's Premier League bungs inquiry intensifies.

Lord Stevens, the former Metropolitan Police commissioner who is conducting the investigation, yesterday said that 39 of the 362 transfers which took place between January 2004 and January this year have raised suspicions. "If we find irregularities we will pass that to the Football Association, if we find criminal acts we will pass that to the police," he said.

Stevens's 20-strong Quest team, which has been checking through the deals for six months, has been granted a further 61 days to produce a final report on the probity of the English Premiership's transfer activities.

The FA, whose chief executive, Brian Barwick, and head of compliance, Jonathan Hall, attended Stevens's briefing to Premiership and recent Premiership chairmen yesterday, has the power to demand access to individuals' bank accounts. That looks to be increasingly necessary after Stevens's requests to agents for "voluntary assistance" fell broadly on deaf ears.

On July 10th this year letters and questionnaires were sent to 150 agents requesting details of their activities. According to Stevens, only 65 "responded fully", prompting him to request the assistance of the agents' guild.

"The Football Agents' Association's board passed a resolution on September 27th urging members to open their bank accounts in this country and abroad to Quest in respect of our specific requests," Stevens said. "There will continue to be a forensic investigation of agents' bank accounts, voluntarily or through the FA. There will be a forensic investigation of entities both onshore and offshore and individuals identified to the inquiry as having received payments out of the transfer monies. There is a large amount of work to be done in relation to that yet."

Any further refusal from agents will prompt a similar request from the FA, which has the power to suspend an agent's licence until co-operation is received. "If we are asked to try to obtain information from agents under powers of inquiry we will of course do so," said the FA in a statement yesterday.

However, among the number who did provide full responses were informants who have given the Quest team valuable leads.

"Meetings have been held with individuals who specifically requested a meeting with Quest, and there have been a number of those," said Stevens.

"Important information has been submitted to this inquiry, some by individuals and a lot by anonymous information. This has been considered in conjunction with detailed examination of forensic accounting analysis of each and every transfer."

If it appears to be a protracted process, that is because it is.

"This is not an easy inquest," admitted Stevens, "but it is essential and we will do everything we can."

Yesterday's briefing did not name the eight clubs under more severe scrutiny, and the clubs themselves have not even been informed.

"If Lord Stevens was to name those eight clubs today there would be an unprecedented frenzy and that is what the team were keen to avoid," said the Premier League's chief executive, Richard Scudamore.

Four of the 29 clubs which attended Stevens's address were ruled out of the investigations. Sheffield United, Watford and Reading were not Premiership clubs during the period covered by the investigations.