The ‘Stealy Dan’ behind football match-fixing?

In May 2012, I had filed a piece for Sportskeeda entitled ‘Match-fixing an accepted business model in European football’. In the piece I had quoted Declan Hill, a Canadian investigative journalist, probably the world’s foremost authority on match-fixing in football, who said that the Italian match-fixing scandal exposed at that time was merely “the tip of the iceberg” and that there existed an “industrial-system of corruption in European football”.

The piece had attracted an acerbic comment from a reader, who suggested that the evidence provided proved that match-fixing only took place in the “most degraded leagues” in Europe bar Serie A – the Greek and Turkish leagues – so there was not need to “generalize” it (the fact of the matter is that match-fixing scandals had even erupted in Germany, Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, Belgium, Austria, etc.).

Europol’s latest revelations – about 680 suspicious matches including qualifying games of the World Cup, Euro Championships and UEFA Champions League for top European club sides, 425 suspects, 50 arrests, etc., – show that Hill’s warning and my piece were not all hot air.

Hill, author of the searing book “The Fix: Soccer and Organised Crime”, has now said in an interview to agencies yesterday that the authorities can nip the global problem in the bud by just arresting one man – Dan Tan Seet Eng, the alleged mastermind behind the scandal, based in Singapore.

“There’s an effort to say that taking on match fixing is a complicated, sophisticated activity that involves taking on dark, mysterious figures,” said Hill. “We know the fixer. There’s one guy who helped fix games in over 50 countries in the world. This is Finnish police, the Hungarian police, the German police, the Italian police saying this.

“This is over 800 pages of the Cremona public prosecutor’s report (from the most recent Italian match-fixing scandal) that not only names the man and gives his birth date, it has his phone records, it talks about where he was, it talks about everything.”

The fact that ‘Stealy Dan’ has been going about his business for the last 10-15 years unimpeded shows that the football authorities and law enforcing machinery of national governments are either incompetent or compromised in their inability to blow the final whistle on his operations. The greater role however lies with the latter, since the jurisdiction of the former is restricted.

In the last few years Dan has been in the news in the international and local media for his alleged activities, which he has denied, often not very convincingly (please look up the Internet if you want to know more about this alleged match fixing mastermind). Dan is among the few big daddies operating in South-East Asia and East Asia, where the urge to gamble and fix, and the illegal betting market have assumed gigantic proportions. He was reportedly the main financier for fellow Singaporean Wilson Raj Perumal’s syndicate, the latter being a Tamilian origin match-fixer who was arrested in Finland last year and whose confessions have led to the latest revelations and crackdown.

Zaihan Mohamed Yusof, an investigative reporter with Singapore’s New Paper speaks during an interview on February 5, 2013. Singapore’s squeaky-clean image as one of the world’s least corrupt nations took a hit after revelations that criminals based in the city-state rigged hundreds of football matches in Europe and elsewhere. Yusof, who is considered a leading authority on match-fixing, admitted he was taken aback by the numbers revealed by Europol.

According to a report in the Singapore media based on last year’s Cremona investigation papers, Dan is reputed to have “made millions fixing 33 games in 2 years” in Serie A and Serie B, and is said to be worth over $50 million.

Judge Guido Salvini, who was one of the lead investigators in the Italian scandal, wrote this in his official report: “Dan Tan and his group constitute a criminal network that is both dangerous and quick to violence for anyone who breaks their rules. This is stated in the testimony of one of the members who said it takes very little in the case of treason by one of the group to risk their murder.” Even Perumal will not get away wherever he hides, one of the syndicate members has warned.

Tan reportedly began his career by taking illegal bets on horse racing and football in Singapore, and later learnt how to fix matches under the tutelage of Eswaramoorthy Pillay (‘Mr X’) and extended the business from Malaysia to Europe, says Perumal. Another associate of theirs was Anthony Santia Raj, who organized two controversial international friendlies in Antalya, Turkey. It was Raj who had reportedly blown Perumal’s cover to the Finnish authorities because it was believed the latter was shortchanging the syndicate to make up the millions he had lost in unsuccessful bets of his own.

The syndicate became so ambitious that they set up their own event management agencies and staged international friendlies for cash-strapped national federations, thus getting to know officials, players and referees whom they then manipulated to deliver desired results or fixed components of matches as per their dictates. So brazen had the match fixers got that they even staged ‘ghost matches’, like the suspected one between Turkmenistan and Maldives U-21 team that never took place, and supplied ‘running commentary’ and match reports to make it look real.

The involvement of PIOs in the shady business highlights the ‘Indian’ element in the football match fixing scandal. Since our sub-continental bookies master minded the cricket match fixing scandal of yore, what is there to prevent Indian bookies from dabbling in international football illegal betting and match-fixing? The illegal betting market is huge in India and though it is usually cricket-oriented as far as sports is concerned, it peaks in football during the FIFA World Cup and Euro Championships, which have a good following here.

Match fixing is, however, just one part of the despicable story that has brought the beautiful game to ruin. No doubt, it must be stamped out to restore the game’s credibility. But football’s rot begins at the very top – the officials who run the game, whether at FIFA or the continental federation or the owners of the biggest clubs in Europe, quite often are hoodlums or men of questionable moral fibre. They continually rip the game and society off by their brazen business dealings and by extorting commissions and kickbacks from television deals, marketing contracts, etc.

Examine the track record of several members of FIFA’s executive committee, including past president Joao Havelange and current incumbent Sepp Blatter, the continental associations (for example, Mohammed bin Hammam in Asia) and the national federations, including India, and you will come up with some interesting details.