Wednesday 27 August 2014

The football fixer who made £3million rigging up to 100 soccer matches around the world

Fixer: Singaporean Wilson Maj Perumal, pictured on trial in Rovaniemi, Finland, in 2011, claims that he figged around 100 football matches and made £3million

He’s known as the Godfather of match-fixing.
Brazen Wilson Raj Perumal has revealed that he made around £3million from rigging soccer matches around the world and claims that he would sometimes sit on team benches giving orders to players and coaches.
The Singaporean, 49, admits that he probably fixed the outcomes of almost 100 matches in total.

He told CNN in his first-ever TV interview: ‘I never really counted, but I think it should be between 80 and 100 football matches.

‘I was on the bench at times, and telling players what to do, giving orders to the coach. It was that easy. There was no policing whatsoever.’
Perumal said that when he was younger he had dreamed of a career in the armed forces.
He said: ‘I had my boyhood dreams. I wanted to be a soldier but during my school days I got a criminal record and couldn't really pursue what I wanted to. And then I got attracted to betting when I was about 19-20 years old.
‘I kind of got hooked and I didn't want to lose… so I started fixing local matches.’
He began fixing matches in the late 1980s in Singapore and eventually joined what international police organization Interpol described as 'the world's most notorious match-fixing syndicate'.
He boasted that his success rate was about 70 to 80 per cent. Astonishingly, some football associations welcomed him ‘with open arms’, he explained.
Former FIFA match-fixing investigator Terry Steans was shown Perumal’s contacts list by the police and was amazed to see that he had relationships with officials and players from 38 countries – out of a possible total of 209.
Perumal added: ‘I have no regrets. It was like, it was a phase of my life and I enjoyed it and I traveled around the world. I had a good time.’
For a time he masterminded this international enterprise - thought to have generated hundreds of millions in fraudulent winnings for crime organisations in the Far East - from a one-bed flat in Wembley, London.
Then he was jailed for match-fixing in Finland in 2011.
He was sentenced to two years but served a year, before being handed over to authorities in Hungary who were also investigating football’s betting scams.
Perumal believes police were tipped off by others inside his organisation and has since exposed some details to media outlets and presumably to police.
The Finnish scandal surrounded the club Rovaniemen Palloseura (RoPS) in the northern city of Rovaniemi. 
Perumal and nine RoPS players were convicted of match-fixing having taken bribes of up to £33,000 each.
Before the Finnish venture, Perumal is alleged to have fixed matches in Africa, the Middle East and Central America. He is reported to have been behind the scandal of the Zimbabwe national team playing games in Asia in 2007 and 2009, which culminated in 98 Zimbabwean footballers and two coaches being suspended in 2012.
And he is ensnared in the huge Europol investigation revealed in 2013, which involves club officials, referees and players and concerns 380 matches in 15 different countries between 2011 and 2013.
Another incident was the international played between Togo and Bahrain in September 2011, when Togo were beaten 3-0 though it later emerged that they were not the real Togo team.
Perumal arrived in London early in 2011, having skipped bail in Singapore, where he faced a charge of hitting a police officer with his car.
He lived among Wembley’s Sri Lankan community and went by the name of Rajamohan Chelliah until the Finnish police swooped in the Arctic and the web started to unravel.
He says that he has gambled away the fortune he made from match-fixing. 
Perumal now helps police combat match-fixing and has published an auto-biography called Kelong Kings.

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