The development of professional sports in Asia is being undermined by endemic match fixing, engineered by international gangs involved in illegal gambling.
The problems of match fixing by bought-off players and referees are at their worst in India, where the national sport is cricket, and in China, where it is football. But the corruption has infected most, if not all, Asian regional soccer leagues, with inquiries currently underway into apparent match fixing in Vietnam, Malaysia and Indonesia.
In Taiwan the national sport is baseball, which came to the island nation when it became a Japanese colony in 1895, and there too the professional league has been plagued by corruption. Fans have stayed away in droves in disgust at games orchestrated by gangsters.
The spread of the infection is being aided by the proliferation of online betting sites. Asians wanting to bet on sports matches and games have an almost infinite number of online bookies available to them, many based outside Asia and regulated by European gambling authorities.
Countries like China and Vietnam have made online betting illegal and blocked the sites of foreign bookmakers. But would-be bettors can bypass these blocks in the same way they can avoid government web censorship by using a virtual private network.
Soccer has become the national sport in China as the economy has developed in the last three decades, and expensive new stadiums hosting newly formed league matches have usually been packed to overflowing with fans. But the discovery 10 years ago of match fixing by criminal betting syndicates has changed all that.
Fans are staying away en masse, disgusted that players, coaches and even referees are frequently paid large bribes to provide the outcome the betting syndicates want. It is not unusual to see defenders score in their own nets to give the gangsters what they've been paid to deliver.
Sponsors and television channels have followed the departing fans. China's Super League kicked off its last season without a sponsor, after tire-maker Pirelli backed out of its contract, and the national television broadcaster, CCTV, refused to show the games.
Chinese soccer fans have responded to the mire at home by switching their allegiance to European clubs. And well-known teams from the British, such as Arsenal and Manchester United, have responded by playing lucrative pre-season games in China to packed stadiums.
Chinese authorities launched a campaign in 2009 to try to clean up the game, and dozens of coaches, players and corrupt referees, known as “black whistles,” have been arrested. The best-known person to be charged and convicted for corruption is Lu Jun, called the “Golden Whistle,” who refereed some of the matches at the soccer World Cup in South Africa in 2010.
It was during that World Cup that a Hong Kong gangster was found to be running an online gambling network that took more than $17 billion in bets on the games.
The Indian Premier League, the top professional cricket organization, is now one of the richest sports bodies in the world. But it is also one of the most corrupt, with criminal bookies regularly paying players $100,000 or more to throw matches or to otherwise orchestrate the games.
India is not alone in its problem of corruption in cricket. Pakistan, South Africa, Kenya and the West Indies have all had corrupt players banned by the International Cricket Council, the global governing body. But the situation in India is so bad that the Supreme Court stepped in late last month to take control of an investigation launched by the Board of Control for Cricket in India that appeared to be going off the rails.
Champion match-fixer eludes European authorities
Singaporean Tan Seet Eng, better known by his English name Dan Tan, has been called by Interpol the boss of the “world's largest and most aggressive match-fixing syndicate.”
But there is doubt this is true. After Tan was arrested in Singapore last year, a report on the sports television network ESPN quoted Singapore police investigators saying the true top bosses are triad criminal gangs in China and that Tan is only a middleman.
There is little doubt, however, that Tan has been up to his ears in the fixing of soccer matches, most of them in European leagues. Warrants for Tan's arrest have been issued in Italy and Hungary, where he has been indicted in absentia.
But Singapore does not have an extradition treaty with the European Union. So when Tan was finally arrested last year, it was over crimes allegedly committed in Singapore, though he has yet to be charged.
Tan was a small-time bookie and promoter of illegal horse racing – for which he served a few months in jail in the early 1990s. He then fell in with another Singaporean match-fixer and bookie, Wilson Raj Perumel, a colourful figure whose exploits include putting together a fake soccer team from Togo in 2010 to play Bahrain.
The standard fee paid to players for fixing European soccer matches was the equivalent of $260,000. Some of the methods used were extraordinary. In November 2010, the goalkeeper for the Italian third division team, Cremonese, is claimed to have drugged the rest of his team to ensure its defeat.
And last year Tan told the German magazine Der Spiegel he had “contributed” $1 million toward fixing a soccer match in Istanbul. When the match failed to go the way Tan had arranged, he got his people at the game to sabotage the stadium's lights and force a cancellation. This they did, but the stadium's backup generators quickly kicked in and Tan lost his money.
