Australian Gambling – WORLD Cup qualifiers and other soccer matches in Australia could have been fixed by an international gambling syndicate.

Seven men have been arrested across England this week, two of which have been charged with conspiring to defraud Asian bookmakers by ‘influencing the course of soccer and matches and placing bets thereon” during November this year.

The men accussed, Chann Sankaran, a 33-year-old Singapore national, and Krishna Sanjey Ganeshan, a 43-year-old with dual British and Singaporean nationality, will appear at a magistrates’ court in Cannock, central England, on Friday

The maximum prison sentence for the offence is 10 years.

At least three of the men arrested were footballers from non-professional clubs, the BBC reported.

The Telegraph in London revealed that another of the men arrested was the alleged fixer.

During a secretly-recorded meeting earlier this month, he said: “I do Australia, Scotland. Ireland. Europe. World Cup. World Cup qualifier.”
The investigator queried, “What, the World Cup?”
The Singaporean national replied, “At least, at least 15. I bought the match.”

He also boasted about ‘having’ teams in Belgium and France, countries where players are not paid high salaries and so are more susceptible to bribes.

It was also reported that another of the men arrested was former Premier League striker Delroy Facey, now, interestingly, a player agent.

Potential gamblers were said to be making hundreds of thousands of dollars by using the inside information to place bets on Asian websites.

The fixer allegedly claimed he would pay a player $8985.50 to take a yellow card at the start of a match. The price for fixing a match was $89,845.

Match-fixing, fuelled by unregulated betting markets in Asia, is widely viewed by football’s authorities as one of the biggest scourges on the game.

One of the biggest recent alleged fixing plots was unearthed in Australia where four English players were among six men charged over match fixing in the Victorian Premier League in September.

The charges came after an investigation into an alleged multimillion-dollar match fixing scheme centring on the Southern Stars, allegedly co-ordinated from overseas.