Inside Asian Gaming

INSIDE ASIAN GAMING | March 2013 6 COVER STORY his phone for people in 34 countries. He was on Facebook, Twitter and Linked In, promoting a business he called Football4U, which investigators say was a front for his illegal activities. He was gambling heavily and in debt and pocketing money he was getting from his investors to fix games. This is according to Chris Eaton, who’d served with Interpol and was head of security for FIFA, the governing body of world football, at the time of Mr Perumal’s arrest. Mr Eaton is a director of the International Centre for Sport Security, a non-profit think tank based in Doha that advises governments, sports associations, event organizers, leagues and clubs on safety and integrity and is probably the most quoted expert on the soiling of the sport. He believes Mr Perumal had become a liability to the gang and its alleged leader, 48-year-old Tan Seet Eng—Dan Tan, as he is known. Mr Perumal believes he was set up and has spent the last two years exacting his revenge, first in Finland, where he served a year for bribing players in that country’s top league, then in Hungary, where he was wanted on a European warrant and taken to a secret location, presumably to assist authorities there as well (or so it would appear from a report later that year by a Hungarian newspaper that said all fixes in Hungary were decided in Singapore). Italian investigators also were eager to talk to the man they call their “primary source of evidence” and went to Finland to question him, as did a representative from Europol, the law enforcement arm of the European Union. News reports say his whereabouts are unknown, although it appears he is giving out enough to enable him to avoid extradition to Singapore. “He’d be in prison for five years, and perhaps he wouldn’t come out of that prison,” Mr Eaton told AP . “He has realized that his only way forward is to become an informant and to cooperate.” From his cell in Finland, Mr Perumal began writing letters. “Seeking police assistance is a violation of code No. 1 in any criminal business,” one went. “Dan Tan broke this code. And now he has to face the consequences. I hold the key to the Pandora’s Box and I will not hesitate to unlock it.” Mr Eaton believes he has yet to tell all he knows. ‘Like Whores’ Spurred into action by Mr Perumal’s revelations, in July 2011 Europol launched an investigation, and on 4th February of this year called a press conference at their headquarters at The Hague to announce its findings on what Europol Director Rob Wainwright called “a sad day for European football”. Nineteen months of legwork conducted in partnership with Interpol and police from 13 EU states had uncovered 680 Wilson Raj Perumal, a Singaporean national and a wanted man in the city-state, says he was one of six “shareholders” in a match-fixing syndicate based in Singapore and known as the “Zingari” (the “Gypsies”). He was trying to get out of Finland on a forged passport when he was arrested in February 2011. il j l i i l i i i l i i i i i i i i i i l i “Football is in a disastrous state,” says Chris Eaton of the International Centre for Sport Security.