It seems like football and illegal betting or match fixing go hand and in hand like Kardashians and sex tapes, unfortunately they don’t all finish with happy endings.
In a police operation in Singapore, 15 people were arrested for being involved in illegal betting on World Cup games. The ages of the people arrested range between 23 and 70 years old. Singapore has plenty of tourist attractions; it seems the government should add illegal sports betting to their list, since the country has become a hot bed for illegal betting sites and organizations. Some of the match fixing incidents around world football has been linked to Singapore and organized crime. It seems like crime syndicates have found a more lucrative business, to prostitution and human trafficking, and less unpleasant to westernized world.
Singapore
police in charge of these arrests reported that the suspects received 471
thousand euros in the last two weeks. This cast a cloud of doubt over some of
the World Cup matches played in this time period. During the police search of
the residences of the accused, they found 206 thousand euros in cash,
computers, cell phones and bank transfer documents.
Singapore laws
could see the men accused of organizing these illegal bets, get five years in
jail. They can also receive fines from 11 thousand to 117 thousand euros.
They should also force them to watch the Nigeria vs. Iran match everyday of
their jail sentence for 12 hours a day. That could be too cruel and even be
considered torture, but I think it would be a fair punishment for their crime
and also a deterrent for others considering taking the same career path.
On a related
development, the British newspaper, The Telegraph, has come out with a report
that Ghana FA has taken bribes in order to fix some of the matches that they
have been involved in. There is nothing proving that the arrests in Singapore
are related to this news development coming out of England, but I also don’t
believe in coincidences or unicorns.
Two men are
being investigated by police at the request of the Ghana FA and their names are
Christopher Antoh Forsythe and Obed Nketiah. Both are FIFA agents.
The Ghana FA
wants to clear their name and image, but when asked about these two men, the response
was that they approached the FA with a proposal of marketing exposure for Ghana
during this World Cup. Nothing gives a country more exposure than illegal
betting and match fixing.
The FA President
claims that he didn’t read between the lines and was acting in good faith, but
never actually signed any agreement with these two men.
In other
words when the two men possibly offered him a brown bag with cash and gave him
a wink, he didn’t really see that as an attempt at match fixing, but he
consider it not a normal way to do business and decided not to accept it.
Two things
we can take from this, either the offers were too low, or in Ghana they have a different
way of bribing officials. Either way both parties can walk away from this with
a “lessons learned” report. For the FA President, his lesson learned is, not to
be in a position where it leads him or his team to be targeted by illegal gamblers
and match fixers. Perhaps he needs to find better friends. For men approaching
FA officials with bribes, make sure the amount is so high that they can’t say
no, and the wink wink after you drop the bag on the table may not be clear
enough as a form of bribe, so just come out and say it. Some people just can’t
read between the lines as they used to. Bribing has become a lost art.
I am sure
more developments will be forth coming in the next couple of days, as going
into this World Cup there were many suggestions that several teams had been targeted
for match fixing by organized crime. Until then, enjoy the games even if some
of them may not be exactly what they appear to be.
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