Inside Asian Gaming

MArch 2016 inside asian gaming 35 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 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, according to estimates, and FIFA says football comprises 90% of it, its popularity solidified by such digital age marvels as those that allow bettors to wager live in real time on the ebb and flow of action on the pitch as it plays out in front of them on TV. This “in- play” or “in-running” betting, as it’s called, is “particularly advantageous for criminals,” according to a 2012 report by Britain’s University of Salford, and it is especially Blast from the Past March 2013 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.” popular in Asia, where most Web gambling takes place. Which only magnifies the problem because few Asian markets are regulated with any stringency, and many not at all. The result is a frustrating dearth of transparency. Vital data—on who is betting and where and on what and how much—is simply not available. “It’s made for corruption,” said economist David Forrest, author of the Salford report. 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”.