Inside Asian Gaming

INSIDE ASIAN GAMING | March 2013 10 police in the city-state had summoned for questioning earlier that month, according to a story in The Straits Times , which identified them all as associates of Mr Tan’s. All were released within hours, and none where charged, the paper said. The day Mr Suljic was arrested, Interpol General Secretary Ron Noble was in Kuala Lumpur playing the diplomat for a seminar on match-fixing hosted by Interpol and the Asian Football Federation. He complimented Singapore police on the Suljic bust, and in a nod to the delicate situation with European investigators emphasized that Singapore and Italy “remain two of Interpol’s most active and effective members”. It was also a show of support for Malaysian authorities, who are in the midst of an investigation of their own into corruption in the country’s Super League, some of the matches in question involving Singapore teams. Last May, Singapore authorities charged a referee and a player with conspiring to fix a Super League contest. The problem prosecutors face is that Internet betting is simply too big (“bigger than Coca-Cola” is how Chis Eaton describes it), too vast in its global reach, the technological opportunities for subverting it too tempting to resist and extremely difficult to track. As Mr Eaton has observed, “Gone are the images of people entering smoke-filled rooms with bags of money and betting slips. Today’s gambling institutions most closely resemble international finance, with its banking, derivatives trading and commodities trading.” Online sports betting is somewhere around a US$500 billion industry, COVER STORY giving them this opportunity and telling me how much this money will change their lives.” In any event, he continued, they are all “like whores who will walk with the highest bidder.”His is not a world that countenances victims. Except maybe the bookmakers. “And they dissolve their losses in the massive turnover of profits.” ‘Bigger than Coca-Cola’ In the statement Europol issued from The Hague it said, “The organised criminal group behind most of these activities has been betting primarily on the Asian market. The ringleaders are of Asian origin, working closely together with European facilitators.” Its investigation tied at least 150 cases directly to fixers in Singapore, to operatives with the kind of backing that enabled them to spread bribes of up of €100,000 per match. If this wasn’t a reference to the “Zingari,” it certainly sounded like one. In February 2012, Italian authorities went through Interpol to obtain an international arrest warrant for Dan Tan, whom they accuse in court documents of running a syndicate that made millions fixing dozens of league and cup games in their country between 2008 and 2011. Indeed, their wide-ranging investigation identifies him as the “common thread” tying all the gangs together, an allegation reflected also in Europol’s findings, bolstered, no doubt, by information provided by Mr Perumal. Italy has no extradition treaty with Singapore, however, and relations between the two on the match-fixing issue “have not been great,”according to the lead prosecutor on the Italian side. “We had hoped for more,” he told AP . Under mounting international pressure, authorities in the city-state finally acted in February. They announced they were sending four senior police officers to Europe to join Interpol’s Global Anti-Match-Fixing Task Force. To further show their good will they offered up a European, a Slovenian named Admir Suljic, a suspected member of the “Zingari” who news reports say had taken it on the lam in the aftermath of Mr Perumal’s arrest. They notified Italian police of his arrival in Milan on 21st February on a one-way ticket from Singapore and he was arrested at the airport on an Interpol warrant on charges including “sporting fraud committed by a criminal association”. He had been one of several people whom In one of his letters from prison, Wilson Perumal recalls “players thanking me for giving them this opportunity and telling me how much this money will change their lives.” In any event, he continued, they are all “like whores who will walk with the highest bidder.” Admir Suljic was arrested at the Milan airport on 21st February on an Interpol warrant on charges including“sporting fraud committed by a criminal association”. in Seoul. In June 2011, an investigationby the Supreme Prosecutor’s Office concluded with lifetime bans for 10 players. Thirty-one more would be blacklisted as a result of a second, broader investigation launched that summer in which 57 were charged: 46 current and former players, managers, coaches and team officials and 11 bookmakers, fixers and their associates and backers. Three clubs had their Sports Toto dividends slashed. Thirty-nine individuals received jail time. One of them, Lee Soo-Cheol, a former K League coach with Sangju Sangmu Phoenix, was found later that year hanging in his apartment south of Seoul. He’d been sentenced to two years in prison for blackmailing the parents of a player implicated in the investigation. Last year, two banned players were charged in a carjacking and kidnapping in the affluent Gangnam section of Seoul. One had made a handful of appearances with the national team. The other, a talented winger, had been working as a hospital receptionist after FIFA blocked his move to a club in Macedonia. Last April, the scandal claimed its fourth fatality, Lee Gyeong-hwan, a midfielder who’d played for Daejeon and Suwon Samsung before he was banned for life. He jumped off the roof of his apartment building in Incheon. He was 24. In one of his letters from prison, Wilson Perumal recalls “players thanking me for