Police must go beyond investigating football corruption reports - MFA

The police need to be pro-active in their investigations into football corruption, and match fixing, Malta Football Association chief executive officer Bjorn Vassallo said. 

“Police only investigate corruption when someone files a report to them,” Vassallo told MaltaToday. “The problem is that not many people are going to speak up. There is a problem of omertà in Maltese football.” 

Indeed, Home Affairs Minister Carmelo Abela has confirmed that the police have not received a single report about the alleged football corruption throughout the ongoing football season. 

“The police should set up a law enforcement unit that deals specifically with sports corruption and investigate through phone-tapping and monitoring the transfer of money,” Vassallo said. “However, when I suggested this idea to [ex-police commissioner] Peter Paul Zammit, he said that he didn’t have enough money and resources.”

Match fixing, Vassallo explained, has become more sophisticated and often involves criminal organisations rigging matches and betting on them. 

“It’s a form of criminality that yields more profits than drugs and prostitution and it is extremely difficult to trace. How can you determine whether a goalkeeper conceded a goal on purpose?

“The MFA can regularise sport for society, but we cannot prosecute criminals and we therefore need the authorities to intervene.” 

The MFA are contracted with SportRader, a Swiss company specialising in sports data analysis. “They analyse Premier League and Division One data, compare it with betting data, and flag suspicious betting patterns to us,” Vassallo said. 

In the 2012-13 season, 32 out of around 300 Premier League and Division One games were flagged as suspicious. In the 2013-14 season, only 12 such games were flagged. Vassallo attributed this drop to a ‘Say No to Match Fixing’ campaign that the MFA had launched that year.

Earlier this week, the MFA’s secretary revealed that an average of €70 million is placed in legal bets per season of Maltese football – €50 million on Premier League games and €20 million on First Division games. The news elicited a strong reaction by Nationalist MP David Agius who called for a united stand against football corruption during a parliamentary debate on money laundering. 

“The €70 million isn’t an issue for us, as it’s regulated betting money,” Vassallo said. “It’s the illegal betting that concerns us and the figures are probably in the region of €70 million.”

‘Malta could update its sports corruption laws’

Vassallo also called for an update of Maltese laws that deal with sports corruption.

“The [Prevention of Corruption (Players) Act] was drafted in 1976 and has only been tweaked since then,” Vassallo said. “It does not speak about match fixing and modern forms of corruption.” 

Speaking in Parliament earlier this week, Education Minister Evarist Bartolo said that discussions between government and the MFA over updates to match fixing laws are ongoing. 

Any such laws are expected to be plucked from the Council of Europe’s Convention on the Manipulation of Sports Competition. The convention was set up to promote co-operation between governments, sports organisations and betting companies in their fight against match fixing. 

Malta, however, has not signed this Convention due to its proposal that sports betting companies be regulated by the country of origin and not by the country it is based in. The gaming industry provides for 12% of Malta’s total GDP. 

“Malta considers this disposition towards betting to be incompatible with the freedom of services and establishments protected in EU Treaties and we have asked the EU Court of Justice for their opinion on the matter,” Bartolo said in response to a parliamentary question by Nationalist MP Jason Azzopardi. “We have no intention to sign this Convention until its dispositions towards betting are already revised or removed.

“However, discussions between government and the MFA are ongoing to implement in law those parts of the Convention that are related purely to sport, criminality, and the sharing of information and intelligence with foreign authorities and sport organisations,” he said. “Our aim is to toughen the fight against match-fixing both locally and internationally.”

‘An intentionally hard-hitting report’ 

An MFA report published earlier this month shed a damning light on the state of corruption in Maltese football.

“Our football is infested by people who grade the game’s sporting spirit at the lowest grade, if any,” MFA Integrity Officer Franz Tabone wrote. “Some club officials are blind when they come across money and will dive into any abyss for it. 

“Some football clubs finance their entire operations by manipulating matches and betting on them, with the winnings going into the club whilst also lining their own pockets.” 

However, Vassallo played down concerns that the MFA has proof of Maltese clubs that operate in this manner.

“I believe that a lot of clubs are properly administered but yes, some of them could be financed by match fixing,” he said. 

“However, we’ve been speaking about the problems of match fixing for years. After seeing how quickly politicians reacted to the news that Hibernians FC were interested in signing Ched Evans, we decided that it was time to bring their attention to what we consider a far more important issue.

“Tabone’s newsletter was intentionally hard-hitting because we were after a reaction. 

“It seems as though we’ve finally got one.”