KUALA LUMPUR, Sept 19 — Malaysians are part of a powerful Asian league for illicit sports gambling that is linking up with local criminal networks in Europe, the Americas, Africa and Down South, an Australian daily has reported.
Citing figures from the World Lottery Association, an umbrella group of legal, government-run gambling firms, the Sydney Morning Herald (SMH) reported yesterday that illegal sports gambling is a global industry and worth some A$90 billion (about RM270 billion) with most of the market parked in Asia.
The newspaper reported that “most” of the Asian market for sports gambling is illegal, rendering it hard to quantify the actual value of the illegal market.
According to the International Police Organisation (Interpol), the total world sports gambling market is worth some A$1 trillion (RM3 trillion).
In Malaysia, football match-fixing was reportedly so bad that in 1994, it was estimated that at least 70 per cent of local leagues here were corrupted, the Australian daily reported.
“When there was an attempt to clean up the very corrupt Singaporean-Malaysian joint football league, the two countries came close to a diplomatic incident.
“The Malaysians claimed the league was so corrupt because the gamblers in Singapore were fixing a lot of the games; the Singaporeans said the league was so corrupt because the criminals in Malaysia were fixing a lot of the games.
“Neither could agree so the league was disbanded because of the corruption,” SMH reported in an article yesterday, titled “The big fix is in”.
It noted that till today, match-fixing appears to have blighted the development of Malaysian football.
“It is this gang of match-fixers from Malaysia and Singapore,” SMH reported, referring to local fixers, “who are now travelling the world to fix games.”
Recently, Malaysian Segaran G. Subramaniam hit the headlines in Australia and here for his purported role in a global network in fixing games.
Earlier this week, state news wire reported Segaran was slapped with 10 charges of match-fixing, including five counts of engaging in conduct that corrupts or could corrupt the outcome of a betting event.
Segaran, referred to as a “bigwig” in the Australian operation for rigging soccer matches, had purportedly received instructions from his handlers in Malaysia and Hungary on the results of the Southern Stars soccer matches.
He, in turn, passed on the information to the Victorian Premier League team’s coach and several players, Bernama reported.
According to SMH, sports fans in Asia have grown increasingly unhappy with the corruption in the world of sports, and have resorted to turn their focus from local leagues to international teams where they think have not been tainted by such fixes, the newspaper reported.
“Asian fixers”, the SMH wrote, have gone on to spread their influence across the globe, trying to corrupt games involving leagues, both big and small, in Europe and North America.
“Now the fixers are coming to Europe, Latin America, Africa, North America and Australia and forming alliances with local criminals.
“It is an ideal marriage... The Asian criminals get access to the teams and players; the local criminals get access to the lucrative Asian gambling market,” SMH said in its report.
The modus operandi of how matches are fixed cross-border is simple, according to the SMH report.
These “Asian fixers” employ “runners” as their agents and are tasked to hire a pointman or local “project manager” with close ties to a particular sporting team, such as a team official, like a coach, the manager or a senior team player, SMH reported.
“The key quality of a project manager is that they have to have lots of credibility and power on the team,” according to the paper, and further explained that the runner gives the project manager a sum of money to start to persuade the players to join the fix.
“The project manager knows which players are most likely to take part in a fix. In a more complicated variation, the runner will arrange the transfer on to the team of various players who have worked fixes before.”
Once the entire scheme is set up, the runner will inform its Asian fixer how the game would be played out and the fixers, in turn, would then “fix” the Asian gambling markets to earn a tidy sum of money, the Australian paper noted.
Citing an example of a major fix on a minor soccer league in Canada in 2009, SMH reported that match-fixers had a network of fixers, runners and players that stretched across nine countries and three continents.
“In this way, they have fixed soccer games in at least 60 countries, including the United States, El Salvador, Guatemala, Zimbabwe, Malta, Cyprus, Greece, Turkey, Finland, Hungary, Serbia, Croatia, Macedonia, Albania, Italy, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Belgium, Singapore, Malaysia, China, Hong Kong and Canada.
“They fixed matches at every level from youth-level football tournaments to the lucrative Champions League to, according to Europol, the Europe-wide police organisation, hundreds of international matches,” SMH reported.
Games in the sports world would continue to be corrupted until the authorities take harsh measures to rein in these illegal gamblers and fixers, the Australian daily added.
