Ooh La La! Sacre Bleu!!

French football has been rocked by two scandals...
... the same scandals occur in England but the mainstream media ensure that such realities never reach the public eye.

Six senior figures have been charged with matchfixing including Caen chief executive Jean-Francois Cortin, the Nimes president Jean-Marc Conrad (who has resigned over the affair), the managing director of Nimes as well as Nimes' main shareholder Serge Kasparian.

The club officials have been accused of fixing a series of matches, notably a 1-1 draw between Caen and Nimes on 13 May, which led to Caen being promoted to Ligue 1 and Nimes avoiding relegation to French football’s third division.

Magistrates have been trying to establish if pressure was exerted by Nimes on other Ligue 2 teams as the club battled against relegation. Recordings of telephone conversations between leading figures of several clubs form a key part of the evidence.

All six men have been released on bail on condition that they have no contact with one another.

French national newspapers have released transcripts of the telephone conversations between Jean-Francois Fortin and Jean-Marc Conrad relating to the investigated football match between Caen and Nimes.

When Fulham retained their Premier League place following a fixed match between themselves and Portsmouth in 2008, the media was silent although the fix was known within the game.
Fulham's manager at the time, Mr Roy Hodgson, is now manager of England.

To compound matters in France, these charges occurred in the same week as Marseille president Vincent Labrune (together with leading club figures) were detained on suspicion of committing transfer fraud.

One British agent (with links to the Fulham match mentioned above) once informed me that he was offered a suitcase containing £40,000 by another agent as a persuader to drop his third party interest in a Spanish defender Liverpool were interested in signing.

This information was provided to me in order to show that corruption acts as an illicit currency within the game.

During the French Revolution of 1789, it was decided that people need equality in relation to the market...
... 225 years later, football has yet to understand this.

Beware Of Greeks Bearing Pipe-Bombs And Wooden Clubs

Greek professional football has been suspended indefinitely after referee Christoforos Zografos was hospitalised after being beaten by two men armed with wooden clubs in the western Kolonos area of Athens.
Zografos is the assistant director of Central Referee Committee (CRC), which appoints match officials.

Rumours of high level matchfixing and biases in the appointment of officials have been rife in recent years, so much so that a decision was made pre-season to bring in a non-Greek to head the CRC.
Unfortunately, the selection was Hugh Dallas who has done more than any other match official in Britain to bring the game into disrepute.

Meanwhile, the situation is even worse in Cyprus where the offices of the Cyprus referees' association were targeted in a pipe-bomb attack after a fire bomb had previously been thrown at the home of an assistant referee in Limassol. Earlier in the year, bombs damaged the car of a prominent referee and the head of the refereeing association.

Cypriot football  has issues with integrity due to the amount of dirty Russian money sloshing around the island.
UEFA are aware of this and yet allowed Cypriot teams to be drawn against Russian ones in the Qualifying Phases of both the Champions League (AEL v Zenit) and the Europa League this season (Apollon v Lokomotiv Moscow and Omonia Nicosia v Dinamo Moscow).
The first leg of AEL v Zenit was a highly suspicious matchfixing event while Omonia had also met Budocnost Podgorica and Metalurg Skopje in previous rounds (teams from Montenegro and FYR Macedonia frequently surface in the underground Russian betting markets).

The statistical likelihood of so many Russian/Cypriot events randomly being drawn are truly astronomical.
So why?

When one governing body ignores dubious structures and energises corruption while another appoints a tainted official to oversee affairs, stuff will eventually happen that will further destroy the integrity of the game.

Omertà

The two women who acted as whistleblowers over the multiple corruptions within FIFA have been publicly traduced by Judge Hans-Joachim Eckert.
Bonita Mersiades and Phaedra Almajid both now live in fear for their families and themselves.
These FIFA corruptions have effectively been whitewashed in a secret report at the expense of the lives of two women (Almajid now has FBI protection).

This will no doubt discourage any future moral and ethical stances over the utter lack of integrity in global football just as the treatments of Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange would tend to make any political whistleblower think twice.

One of the most remarkable aspects of the FIFA Affair (Qatargate) is that it is a clear indication of how the locus of football criminality has shifted towards the blackest of markets in recent years. In the current scenario, Michael Garcia is being painted as a white knight riding to the rescue against the smoke-filled backroom deals and payments of bribes and other enhancing consumerisms of FIFA.

We discussed this in a previous article when Garcia was appointed to this role: "A parallel example of murkiness is at FIFA where the Secretary General of Interpol, Ronald Noble, supported the appointment of Michael Garcia as FIFA chief investigator of corruption when Garcia's review of the FIFA/ISL scandal is seen as a cover up by Reform consultant Michael Pieth and FIFA judge Hans-Joachim Eckert."

Manus manum lavat.

So we have a standard Italian structure being the cover up of choice - football needs a mani pulite (clean hands) approach to dealing with corruption.

But the cover ups spread further.
There are four primary bodies addressing matchfixing in world football - Interpol, Europol, Early Warning and Federbet.
None are fit for purpose and all have private hidden agendas.
If an individual chooses to whistleblow a corrupted match to any of these bodies, the most likely action is inaction.

And the national associations and leagues are no better.
We would not dream of disclosing our evidences of matchfixing in the Premier League to Richard Scudamore or the FA.
And, higher up the feeding chain Javier Tebas, the president of La Liga, understands that presenting evidence of matchfixing in Spain results in absolutely no reaction.

And over the last two days in London, the FA has launched the Sports Betting Integrity Forum with inputs from all the main British/Gibraltan bodies who are only concerned about matchfixing when they are outside the loop of insider trading.
All five bookmakers involved either accept insider money and/or actively orchestrate criminalities.

On the bases established by these whitewashes, the foundations of future corruptions are built.

Yesterday, Narayanaswami Srinivasan was laughably cleared of orchestrating matchfixing and spotfixing in IPL cricket matches in 2013 despite the evidence of taped conversations and his close alliances with the underground bookmaking world.
Earlier this year, he had remarkably been appointed as chairman of the International Cricket Council despite the scandals swirling around him.
What message does this send to the participants in the new IPL football expansion (and, by the way, it is surely not totally surprising that the three main English participants in this competition are Michael Chopra, Peter Reid and that undischarged bankrupt of dubious integrity, David James)?

These sporting corruptions parallel clearly with the world of mainstream capitalism and offshore financial centres.
For example, Grace Perez-Navarro of the OECD thinks that money laundering will be a historical anomaly by 2018.
It won't.
Lack of staff, lack of backing, lack of expertise, lack of regulation, lack of political will and yet to be created distortions of integrity will see to that.

Similarly amusing is the hyperreality that the UK police are to utilise the expertise of the Royal Bank of Scotland to address financial fraud in markets...
... that would be the same Royal Bank of Scotland that has just been found guilty of currency benchmark manipulations!

Manus manum lavat.

Global corruption requires global action and global regulation, not internalised double-teaming.