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Investigation Finds Suspected Fixing in 680 Soccer Matches
Investigation Finds Suspected Fixing in 680 Soccer Matches
(about 1 hour later)
THE HAGUE — Criminal organizations have infiltrated the highest levels of European and international soccer, threatening the integrity of the sport, global law enforcement officials said Monday as they disclosed the results of a 19-month investigation that indicated that hundreds of people had been involved in match-fixing.
Soccer is known throughout much of the world as the beautiful game. But the sport’s ugliest side — the scourge of match-fixing — will not go away.
At least 425 people from more than 15 countries — including club and match officials, and current and former players — are suspected of conspiring in nearly 700 matches in recent years on behalf of Asian criminal syndicates that made millions of dollars in profits by betting on the results, they said.
With next summer’s World Cup in Brazil drawing closer, a European police intelligence agency said Monday that a 19-month investigation revealed widespread occurrences of match-fixing in recent years, with nearly 700 games globally deemed suspicious. The list of matches is staggering and encompasses about 380 games in Europe, covering World Cup and European championship qualifiers, as well as Champions League games, including one match played in England.
Those matches included qualifying games for the World Cup and the European Championships, and two Champions League matches, including one in England.
Officials of Europol, an agency that works with countries across the continent, offered details that strike at the sport’s core: nearly $11 million in profits and nearly $3 million in bribes were discovered during the investigation, which uncovered “match-fixing activity on a scale we have not seen before,” said Rob Wainwright, the director of Europol.
“This is a sad day for European football, and more evidence of the corrupting influence of organized crime,” said Rob Wainwright, the director of Europol, which helped coordinate the investigation among European Union member states, Interpol and non-European nations.
Fixers typically seek to dictate a game’s result by corrupting the players or the on-field officials, and officials said Monday that roughly 425 people were under suspicion because of the investigation, with 50 people having been arrested. The scope of the investigation covered games from 2008 to 2011.
Citing the doping scandal that has undermined public trust and interest in cycling, Wainwright warned that the problem must be tackled quickly or soccer would lose the trust of the public.
An organized crime syndicate based in Asia is believed to be the driving force behind the fixing activity, which stretches across at least 15 countries, officials said. Individual bribes were, in some instances, upward of $136,000, and fixers would place bets on the tainted matches through bookmakers in Asia. Various matches in Africa, Asia and South and Central America were identified as suspicious, though the European element of the investigation is the most significant.
In all, 680 matches have been identified as suspect, officials said, including 300 outside Europe, primarily in Asia, Africa and Latin America.
“This is a sad day for European football,” Wainwright said at a news conference in the Netherlands, adding: “It is clear to us this is the biggest-ever investigation into suspected match-fixing in Europe. It has yielded major results, which we think have uncovered a big problem for the integrity of football in Europe.”
It was not clear how many of the matches identified were previously known and how many were newly discovered.
But officials at the news conference repeatedly dodged questions from reporters on how many of the 680 matches cited were previously known and how many were newly discovered.
Officials declined to identify any of the teams or individuals involved in the investigations, citing the need to guard the confidentiality of police procedures.
Nor would they identify any of the teams and individuals newly linked to match-fixing, citing the need to guard the confidentiality of police procedures.
The officials, speaking to journalists at Europol headquarters, said that a joint team was created in July 2011 after investigators in several European countries came to realize that there was a major overlap between suspects in separate match-fixing inquiries.
Still, the breadth of the investigation was significant, and it inspired strong reactions from global fans. Even as the news conference continued, fans took to social media to speculate on which matches might have been fixed, with a particular fascination as to what English Champions League contest drew the investigators’ scrutiny. Indeed, the notion that corruption has been identified in British soccer, home of the English Premier League, the world’s most popular grouping, will reverberate globally.
A single criminal group, based in Asia, is behind most of the matches identified in the investigations, Europol and Interpol officials said, and an international arrest warrant has been issued seeking the extradition of the ringleader to Europe to face fraud and bribery charges.
“It would be naïve and complacent of those in the U.K. to think such a criminal conspiracy does not involve the English game and all the football in Europe,” Wainwright said.
Europol did not publicly identify the ringleader of the gang, but several knowledgeable law enforcement officials later said on condition of anonymity that it was a man based in Singapore known as Dan Tan. Tan has been implicated in match-fixing cases dating to 1999, at least, the officials said.
Europol and Interpol officials said an international arrest warrant had been issued for the ringleader of the Asian syndicate so that he can be extradited to Europe to face fraud and bribery charges.
Asked about the level of international cooperation Europol was getting from other national authorities involved in enforcement of the warrant, Wainwright said, “I’m satisfied that Interpol is in active dialogue” with the other parties. “It’s important that all international arrest warrants are pursued.”
Europol did not publicly identify the ringleader, but several knowledgeable law enforcement officials later said on condition of anonymity that it was a man based in Singapore known as Dan Tan. They said Tan had been implicated in match-fixing cases dating to 1999.
The officials repeatedly dodged questions from reporters seeking to learn just how many of the suspected match-fixing cases they announced Monday were new.
The conclusion of Europol’s investigation comes after a slew of high-profile incidents. Last month FIFA, the sport’s governing body, barred 41 players for fixing matches in South Korea; in December 2012 the president of the South African Football Association was suspended after FIFA determined that four exhibition matches before the 2010 World Cup had been fixed; and last summer a complex match-fixing network was discovered in Italy, rocking that country’s high-profile professional leagues.
German prosecutors, for example, have previously identified dozens of cases, and it was not clear how many of those were included in the tally. The country with the most cases identified by Europol was Turkey, with 79. Germany was next with 70, followed by Switzerland with 41. The agency also reported cases in Belgium, Croatia, Austria, Hungary, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Slovenia and Canada.
In addition, German prosecutors had previously identified dozens of cases, although it was not clear how many of those, or the ones also previously cited, were included in the tally of 680. The country with the most cases identified by Europol was Turkey, with 79; Germany was next, with 70, followed by Switzerland, with 41. Cases were also cited in Belgiuim, Croatia, Austria, Hungary, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Slovenia and Canada.
The breadth of the investigation inspired strong reactions from global fans. Even as the news conference was going on, fans took to social media to speculate on which matches might have been fixed. And while officials would not offer specifics, that did not stop fans — particularly those of the English game — from guessing at the possibilities, with the only certainty being that the English Champions League match occurred in the last three or four years.
While the great majority of suspect European matches identified in the investigation took place outside Britain, the notion that corruption has been identified in British soccer, home of the world’s most popular league, will reverberate globally.
“It would be naïve and complacent of those in the U.K. to think such a criminal conspiracy does not involve the English game,” Wainwright said.
To rig the matches, officials said, the criminals operated a sophisticated organization, employing some people to deal with players and referees, others to handle money and place bets, others to carry out money laundering, on up to a strategic command at the top.
To rig the matches, officials said, the criminals operated a sophisticated organization, employing some people to deal with players and referees, others to handle money and place bets, others to carry out money laundering, on up to a strategic command at the top.
Any one match-rigging operation might have involved as many as 50 people in 10 countries, they said.
Declan Hill, a Canadian journalist and the author of “The Fix: Soccer and Organized Crime,” cautioned too that North American fans of the game should not assume match-fixing is only a problem overseas. There have been instances of match-fixing in a lower-level league in Canada, and Hill said his reporting has indicated that several players in Major League Soccer have been approached by gamblers in recent years.
The actual business of rigging a match typically involves bribing players or a referee, or both, in an effort to deliver a predetermined result. The Asian crime syndicates typically want to achieve a particular margin of victory, rather than a precise outcome, officials said.
According to Hill, there have been no instances of fixed games in M.L.S., though there have been reported incidents in the Concacaf Champions League, a regional tournament in which M.L.S. teams participate. There have also been instances of M.L.S. players giving gamblers information that could affect a game’s outcome, like an unreported injury to a key player, Hill said.
In a dramatic illustration, Bajan Nemeth, a Hungarian prosecutor, showed a clip from a 2010 Argentine-Bolivia under-20 match in which, he said, the Hungarian referee could be shown throwing the match by awarding a penalty kick as time was expiring, despite no foul having occurred.
Dan Courtemanche, a spokesman for M.L.S., said that last year the league enrolled in an early-warning system that monitors betting worldwide for indicators of potential match-fixing and that this year the league is instituting rules that ban the use of cellphones and electronic communication from the locker room beginning an hour before kickoff of games.
The fraudulent call allowed Argentina to win, 1-0, the margin of victory sought by the criminal syndicate, Nemeth said.
In addition to the public, which is deprived of true sports competition when match-fixing occurs, the officials noted that the criminals had defrauded betting companies. The investigation involved analysis of more than 13,000 e-mail messages and phone calls.
Officials said 14 people had been sentenced to prison for a total of 39 years, though they noted that the difficulty of evidence for proving fraud and bribery, as well as differing treatment for such crimes across Europe, complicated prosecution.
Friedhelm Althans, the chief organized crime investigator for the city of Bochum, Germany, said his own involvement with the case began in 2008 when he was carrying out an inquiry into “real gangsters, including guns and shooting,” and a link was found to a soccer club in Namur, Belgium. Althans said that when a soccer betting scandal emerged in Cremona, Italy, he saw that the cast of characters greatly overlapped with the names he was seeing elsewhere.
Officials were able to identify certain people from Asia, he said, by tracking their immigration records, and made the connection to more countries.
“I knew that the persons involved in Italy were involved in the other European countries, as well as the boss in Singapore,” Althans said.
Despite the scale of the problem, which is magnified by the news media scrutiny of professional-level soccer, Wainwright noted that the profits identified by officials Monday — about $10.9 million— were “tiny in the grand scheme of organized crime.”
“I still think it’s important, though,” he said, “because it’s had an impact on very many matches, many officials, it goes to the heart of the integrity of the game. This is not a threat to be measured in dollar signs or euro signs.”
Declan Hill, a Canadian journalist and the author of “The Fix: Soccer and Organized Crime,” has been tracking the issue of match-fixing for years. In an interview he cautioned that North American fans of the game should not assume match-fixing is only a problem overseas. There have been instances of match-fixing in a lower-level league in Canada, and Hill said his reporting indicated that several players in Major League Soccer were approached by gamblers in recent years.
According to Hill, there have been no instances of fixed games in the M.L.S., although there have been reported incidents in the Concacaf Champions League, a regional tournament in which M.L.S. teams participate.
There have also been instances of M.L.S. players giving gamblers information that could affect a game’s outcome, like an unreported injury to a key player, Hill said.
Dan Courtemanche, a spokesman for the M.L.S., said last year that the league enrolled in an early-warning system that monitors betting worldwide for indicators of potential match-fixing and that this year the league was instituting new rules that ban the use of phones and electronic communication from the locker room beginning an hour before kickoff.
“While we have faith in the integrity of those associated with M.L.S., we will not ignore what has already transpired around the world,” Courtemanche said. “We are not so naïve as to think we are immune.”
“While we have faith in the integrity of those associated with M.L.S., we will not ignore what has already transpired around the world,” Courtemanche said. “We are not so naïve as to think we are immune.”
