Own goal: the remarkable allure of Finnish football for Asian betting syndicates

Fixed matches, bribed players, illegal betting, organised crime, prison sentences. What on earth is happening on and off the pitch?

Wilson Raj Perumal

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By Antti J. Peltonen
     
      Money laundering, police raids, extortion, and death threats; dozens of manipulated league and cup matches on which someone somewhere has made millions.
      Bribes of EUR 50,000 paid out to bent players.
      Orders to play out of your skin or as if you were out to lunch, depending on the client's wishes. To succeed from the penalty spot or to blast the ball into the fourteenth row of the stands - to do on the pitch exactly as has been arranged.
      And then there's this guy named Wilson Raj Perumal, who one way or another seems to have been inovlved up to his ears in all the above.
      What on earth is happening in the modest little world of Finnish football?
     
What causes a Singapore-based criminal organisation to extend its tentacles into the Finnish soccer leagues?
      I mean, after all's said and done, football is merely a summer sport played during the cottage season when there is not enough snow for skiing and the ice hockey crowd are out on the golf links, a sport that basically does not interest the media any more than it does the wider public.
      So why would anyone in the illegal Asian betting markets be remotely interested in the results of matches in the Veikkausliiga, let alone what goes on in the lower divisions?
      The answer lies in the very fact of Finnish football's humble profile: as any con will tell you, pulling off a crime is a lot easier when nobody is looking your way.
     
Modern sports bookmaking, fixed odds and variable odds betting, is a gigantic business, with as much as a thousand billion (yes, billion) euros in turnover.
      It is a financial network that crosses continental boundaries at the speed of broadband, and lurking in the background, pulling many of the strings, are international crime syndicates.
      The bulk of sports betting today, whether legal or outside the bounds of national laws, takes place online.
      In the case of football, organised crime is attracted to the party by the huge sums of money that change hands in the sport.
      According to the European Football Federation UEFA, as much as EUR 900 million in legal bets was wagered on just one European Champions League tie.
      Football is also a popular object for gaming in the Far East.
      And, strange as it may sound, in particular in China there is a ready and steady market in illegal betting on the outcome of matches played in...
      Finland??!!?
     
It is hardly any wonder, then, that the scandal that has shaken the very credibility of Finnish football has tangled roots and branches that extend between Rovaniemi, Tampere, and Singapore with such dizzying complexity that nobody really has a firm idea of quite how it all went down.
      No, not even the National Bureau of Investigation, Finland's central criminal police arm, who have been investigating the case for months in collaboration with colleagues in Interpol.
     
     
"During the last fifteen minutes before the game kicked off [and by inference before the odds were frozen], the variable odds on the result had changed so dramatically that it was apparent that a million had been staked in bets."
      Excerpt from the Lapland District Court judgement, July 2011.
     
     
There are two main strands to the Finnish end of the scandal.
      One is the disappearance in disgrace from the Finnish footballing map of Tampere United (TamU), winners of three Finnish Championship titles in the last decade, who lost their league licence earlier this year over suspicions of money-laundering.
      Then there is the case of Rovaniemen Palloseura (RoPS), and the July court ruling in which no fewer than nine RoPS players were found guilty of taking bribes and received suspended sentences of between six months and twenty months.
      At the same trial, the same Wilson Raj Perumal mentioned above was given a two-year prison term.
      Why would a dodgy businessman from the Tamil minority of Singapore have started his activities with the none-too-stellar local team in Rovaniemi, a city on the Arctic Circle?
     
Put yourself, if you will, into a position where the livelihood of your immediate family, possibly even your entire extended family, depends solely and entirely upon your income.
      Imagine that somebody offers you a job that entails your travelling to a foreign country, where life turns out to be a good deal more expensive than you were informed in advance that it would be.
      Imagine that you also earn less each month than you had anticipated, netting something between 500 and 1,200 euros monthly after tax and deductions, and that your closest colleagues, who are also your only friends in this foreign land, are all in exactly the same boat.
      One day somebody approaches you who would - for a little bit of jiggery-pokery on your behalf - be willing to pay you a hundred times what you are earning legitimately.
     
Imagine that all your mates say they would be ready to take the offered backhander.
      What would you do?
      Would you blow the whistle?
      Or would you take the bribe - and hope to God you don't get caught?
      The foreign players on the RoPS roster, seven Zambians and two Georgians, took the money and hoped for the best.
      It wasn't exactly that anyone twisted their arm or forced them. They were simply tired of Rovaniemi, a parochial little city that really did not mean anything to them.
      Many of those who were convicted in July claimed that they had stumbled into the path of crime out of force of circumstances. The food was lousy, the days were too long, or they were too short on daylight. Even the public seemed to be of the same mind: the stands at the RoPS home ground appeared to have quite as many stewards as supporters.
     
What kind of life was that? Certainly not the kind that a real professional footballer should have to endure. The frustration grew, and along with it the greed.
      And so the players agreed among themselves to accept the euros that were being waved their way.
      Neither the coaching staff nor the other players had any inkling of what was going on. The secrecy was helped by the fact that the foreigners in the RoPS team formed a close-knit social group both on and off the pitch.
      In a sense they were a team within a team, but with the seminal difference that while the others kicked and headed the ball for Veikkausliiga points and to keep RoPS in the top division, the insider crowd were playing for bribe-envelopes. The rest of the story is a slice of domestic criminal history.
     
Between June 2008 and February 2011, RoPS played at least 28 fixed matches, on which Wilson Raj Perumal or his shadowy criminal associates placed big wagers on the illegal Asian gaming markets.
      The role of the 45-year-old Perumal in the scam was to be the "fixer", the middle-man who acted as a link between the wealthy financiers out East and those at the sharp end of the deception - namely the corrupt players.
     
However, one thing we should get straight at the outset is that there were no cosy arrangements to "throw" matches up there on the Arctic Circle.
      We had in fact seen that sort of thing some years ago in a scandal that ripped through pesäpallo, Finnish-rules baseball, as coaches and players conspired to defraud the national lottery and gaming firm Veikkaus by agreeing in advance on the results of meaningless matches (fixtures between clubs neither threatened with relegation nor desperate for a play-off spot) towards the end of the regular season.
      What was going on in Rovaniemi was a subtly different form of match-fixing, which perhaps requires some explanation.
     
The first thing to understand is that when "the fix is in" on a football match, it does not necessarily have anything to do with the result as such, with the final scoreline.
      It can equally relate to what goes on during the course of the game.
      In fact, for purely practical reasons, match-fixing seldom means "fixing the outcome of the match", for to do so would require the collusion and goodwill of many parties, including gamblers, players (possibly from both teams), team officials, and even referees.
      On the other hand, manipulating the game in some way or another is possible to arrange - at least in principle - a great deal more easily.
     
To those brought up on the treble chance or 1-2-X football pools or straightforward wagers on which horse is going to win the Dante Stakes, it may come as a surprise to learn that people will bet on almost anything.
      Which team will win the first free-kick?
      When will the second substitution take place?
      Will the goalscorer strip off his shirt in celebration? Which team will be leading after 75 minutes? Will the total number of goals scored in the game exceed four, or will it be under three?
      How many corners will be given? How many yellow cards?
      The only limit is one's fertile imagination.
     
     
"The man had suggested that they (RoPS) could score as many goals in the game as they wished, but the opposition had to score once between the 75th and the 90th minute of the match."
      Excerpt from the Lapland District Court judgement, July 2011
     
     
Arranging matches to suit a gambler's wishes does not, therefore, require the input of an entire team, but a few players will suffice.
      This is what happened in Rovaniemi.
      Just to take a few examples - let's say the object of the exercise was to ensure that the team lost by at least three clear goals. Or alternatively to make sure that the opposition scored a goal in the last fifteen minutes of normal time.
      Believe it or not, if the scam worked, the winnings were calculated in millions of euros. Even the players themselves were given bribes that could run into the tens of thousands for their cooperation.
     
The money was paid - usually only after a successful outcome had been achieved - almost exclusively in hard cash.
      Sometimes the euros changed hands on fabricated fishing trips, or at clandestine meetings under bridges.
      Or it might have happened in the stadium toilets or in apartments rented by the players above the Las Vegas bingo hall in Rovaniemi.
      There's a story that still does the rounds up north of how some of the Zambians in the RoPS squad thrust a couple of 500-euro notes into the surprised doorman's hand in order to jump the queue to get into a popular watering-hole.
      All of a sudden, the daily grind in Santaland wasn't quite as grim as it had been.
     
They say that football isn't a sport, but more a way of life.
      One former Liverpool FC manager, the late Bill Shankly, went a lot further, with the famous and often misquoted remark: "Some people believe football is a matter of life and death; I am very disappointed with that attitude. I can assure you it is much, much more important than that."
      In any event, football is something that brings people together, irrespective of race, language, or religious creed, better than anything else in the world.
      Just look at the sport's governing body FIFA, which has more national members than there are in the United Nations.
     
In other words, it is natural that the discipline's negative side-effects are by no means restricted to criminal trials in Finland.
      A recent topical example, should we need one, was the withdrawal - by the Turkish FA - of the 2010-11 Turkish champions Fenerbahçe from the UEFA European Champions League over an ongoing match-fixing investigation that had earlier seen the club's president remanded in custody.
      UEFA has reported that it has looked into no fewer than 32,000 matches in a year, of which as many as one per cent displayed signs of "abnormal" betting activity.
      This alone suggests that more than 300 games have been manipulated in some manner for material gain in a single year.
     
In addition to players, club officials have been offered bribes for their cooperation, and naturally also the referees and assistant referees who oversee fair play on the pitch.
      In February 2011 in Antalya in Turkey, in two friendly internationals (Estonia vs Bulgaria 2-2 and Latvia vs. Bolivia 2-1) that were played in the same stadium and just two hours apart, all seven goals scored came from the penalty spot.
      It requires a considerable leap of faith to believe this was a coincidence.
      The Finnish FA did not make that leap, but hurriedly cancelled a friendly against Bolivia that was to have been played in Antalya, apparently arranged by the same betting fraudsters.
The Antalya operation was an impressive tour de force, but the credit for the finest or at least the most outrageous example of match-fixing belongs closer to home.
      Step forward our old friend Wilson Raj Perumal, who arranged a friendly last September between Togo and Bahrain in Bahrain, in which the 11 players who trotted out onto the field in yellow were not members of the official Togolese national squad at all, but a bunch of ringers brought together by Perumal and others with the express intention of manipulating events on the field of play.
      As it happens, the "real" Togolese national team were on a bus at the time, returning from an official game in Botswana.
      The very one-sided match was itself more than a little bizarre, with the Bahraini side actually putting the ball in the net eight times without reply, though for some reason five of the goals were disallowed for offsides that a local reporter wrote were "questionable".
      This "non-match", too, was the object of massive bets in the Far East.
     
In the UK, the Gambling Commission, a body established under the Gambling Act of 2005 to regulate commercial gambling in Great Britain, has calculated that the aggregate value of the legal and illegal Asian betting markets on the annual level is of the order of EUR 550 billion.
      This figure, from 2008, is probably an understatement.
      Most of the sports betting that takes place in Asia is illegal, which makes it almost impossible to arrive at any reliable numbers.
      It is precisely the lack of oversight, the colossal liquidity of the market, and the highly fragmented nature of the Asian betting sector that explains why multinational criminal syndicates have concentrated their operations in places like Singapore. It is not only making money from football that stirs their interest, but also laundering it.
     
And this brings us neatly to the subject of Tampere United. The strange case of TamU is a textbook example of what happens when you give your little finger to an international crime syndicate. Pretty soon they are back for your entire hand and a forearm to go with it.
      Tampere United came into being in July 1998 on the ruins of another Tampere club, Ilves, that had fallen on hard times.
      TamU inherited the Ilves place in the second tier of Finnish football, and won promotion to the Veikkausliiga in their first season, in 1999.
      Thereafter, United won the Veikkausliiga title on three occasions in 2001, 2006, and 2007, and even made it through to the third qualifying round of the European Champions League in 2007-2008.
      However, this success came at a price, and the club was living beyond its modest means (attendances at home games came nowhere close to filling the 17,000-seat Ratina Stadium).
      By the autumn of 2010, the coffers were empty.
     
At this point, the club's management clutched at a dangled straw and accepted roughly EUR 300,000 from a Singapore company named Exclusive Sports Limited.
      In all probability, in the background to this outfit was a familiar name, that of Mr. Wilson Raj Perumal.
      In return for the much-needed cash infusion, the dodgy firm wanted a degree of decision-making power in the TamU operations, particularly as related to player policy.
      The intention was not to limit things only to betting scams but also quite plausibly to launder money realised through illegal means.
      In the preliminary police investigation, members of the then United management team are suspected of aiding and abetting in money-laundering.
     
If a crime really was committed, it certainly did not pay on this occasion.
      The Disciplinary Committee of the Finnish FA slammed the door on TamU, shutting the club out from all competitive activities - "indefinite suspension" was the term used - in April of this year, just before the start of the new season.
      The limited company behind the club went into liquidation in June.
      The decline and fall of Tampere United was thus a speedy affair.
      Or was it?
      Only last week, TamU announced they would be seeking a playing licence for the 2012 season via an appeal to the Lausanne-based Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS).
     
Returning now to Rovaniemi, the match-fixing market up north might have continued undetected for quite some time, but in February 2011 an Asian-looking gent - possibly despatched to the northern wastes by a rival criminal outfit - marched into the local police station and said he wanted to supply a tip-off.
      He reported that there was a man from Singapore at large in Finland under a false passport, whose real name was Wilson Raj Perumal.
      Before very long, Perumal was nabbed at Helsinki-Vantaa International Airport, just as he was attempting to leave the country.
      Initially the suspect clammed up tight and denied everything.
      He even attempted to abscond from his remand hearing by running off into the freezing Rovaniemi winter.
      Dressed in summer clothes, he did not get far.
     
Perumal then gave in and started to talk. The nine RoPS foreign reinforcements were called in for questioning, some of them straight from the training ground with their boots on.
      The police carried out raids on apartments, took DNA samples, and confiscated mobile phones and computers.
      Gradually the impressive dimensions of the scandal began to unfold.
      Finnish football found itself in the unusual position of having crossed the international news threshold, with headlines made in India and even as far away as Latin America.
      Jouko Kiistala, the long-serving RoPS managing director, fell on his sword and resigned. The club's then head coach John Allen (who has since received his marching orders as the club are languishing at the foot of the Veikkausliiga table) naturally wondered what the hell he was supposed to do with a squad of players of whom half were in police custody.
     
Formal charges were expected in the spring, and were forthcoming.
      The trial took place in the Lapland District Court from June 9th, and in July sentences were handed down, with all nine implicated players getting suspended terms.
      The majority of those convicted have since left the country.
      They left behind a club that is currently staring at sporting oblivion.
      As of Sunday evening, after they battled to a 0-0 draw at home to bottom-but-one VPS of Vaasa, Rovaniemen Palloseura have collected just 13 points from 22 Veikkausliiga matches this season, and have not won a league game - home or away - at the past sixteen attempts.
      They are seven points adrift of their nearest rivals, and relegation to the First Division is almost a certainty, unless they produce a Lazarus-like recovery over the remaining 11 fixtures.
     
And what of the brains behind the match-fixing and bribery scandal, Wilson Raj Perumal?
      He is currently serving his two-year sentence inside, in Oulu Prison, and is apparently quite satisfied with his lot in life.
      Things could be a great deal worse, for instance if he were in the less comfortable confines of a Singapore prison cell.
      He's probably not overly out of pocket, either, as according to his own statement the criminal organisation looks after its own.
      Perumal, along with a few of the players who were convicted, has in any case already filed an appeal against the sentence to the Court of Appeal.
      Helsingin Sanomat requested an interview with Perumal. He declined.
     
     
"According to Musonda, 'Simon' had threatened him and his family that they would be killed if he did not do as he had been asked."
      Excerpt from the Lapland District Court judgement, July 2011.
     
     
The documents of the preliminary investigation and police hearings in the RoPS bribery scandal make for interesting reading, albeit they are somewhat laborious to wade through - they run to a hefty 1,136 pages.
      Combing through them, one learns that in recent years there have been a good few other shady individuals active in Finland besides Perumal.
      For example, two characters who are still at large and go by the nicknames K-Junior and Simon.
      What also emerges is that aside from the crew up in Rovaniemi, Perumal & Co. bribed players in Oulu and in Mariehamn (in the Åland Islands), and possibly also in Tampere.
      For instance, there were the Zambian brothers Donewell and Dominic Yobe, who played for AC Oulu during the 2010 season and who were sentenced in Oulu District Court in May 2011 to 7-month suspended prison terms for having taken bribes.
     
The funny money, EUR 25,000 apiece, came naturally from Perumal, allegedly for influencing the outcome of a match between AC Oulu and TPS Turku.
      At the time of his arrest, Dominic Yobe was actually already on the playing roster of Helsinki HJK, who signed him from Oulu in the pre-season.
      Hence it was a rather close call that the match-fixing fiasco did not extend to affect HJK, by far the most significant team in the nation's leagues.
      That would have been a catastrophe.
      Had the Helsinki club got itself embroiled in all this, we would not have enjoyed the very un-Finnish football boom that HJK managed to drum up - at least in the metropolitan area - by their spirited Eurocup showings in recent weeks.
      Names like Alexander Ring, Rafinha, or even the goalscoring hero Teemu Pukki would not mean anything to the wider audience.
     
But as we know from bitter experience, the Finns are not a football-crazy nation so much as one that gets briefly and deeply intoxicated by success.
      Last Thursday, HJK finally got knocked out of the Europa League just before the group stages.
      The 6-1 drubbing they received from Schalke 04 in the second leg of their tie also brought the brief boom to a juddering halt.
      When HJK travel to Valkeakoski on Monday to meet FC Haka in a Veikkausliiga fixture, normal service will be resumed.
      This classic encounter, between two teams who have won 12 Veikkausliiga titles between them since the league came into being in 1990, and no less than 32 Finnish titles since things got started back in 1908, will be watched by a paltry crowd (just 1,413 turned up to see HJK thrash Haka 5-0 in Valkeakoski in June).
      A 15-second clip of the highlights will be shown on the sportscast after the YLE evening news, and in Tuesday's papers there will be the result but not much more.
     
And yet for all that, far away from Helsinki and Valkeakoski and Finland, the Haka-HJK "classic" will be the subject of big bets on the illegal Asian markets.
      And for this reason alone, among the thin crowd in the Factory Ground on Monday will be at least one Chinese gentleman talking non-stop into his mobile phone, tasked with reporting the events of the game in real time to gamblers in the Far East who are busily placing live-in-running bets on Finnish football.
      Similar mobile phone chatterers have been spotted in Finland even at Second Division clashes between middle-of-the table sides that hardly anyone hereabouts has ever heard of.
      Why? Why on earth?
     
Well, let's make a list, shall we?
      * Small attendances...
      * Lousy wage-levels for the players...
      * Not much media coverage...
      * Poor club management...
      * Legislation that has not been overhauled since the 1990s...
      * And a summer league season.
      There you have six good reasons why Finland is an exceptionally attractive location in which to launder money and bribe players.
     
In contrast to the situation almost everywhere else in the world, football's social significance in Finland is rather limited, in fact almost negligible.
      In 2010, the average gate for Veikkausliiga games was 2,224. This was actually 700 fewer bottoms-on-seats than in 2006, the highwater mark of the past decade.
      The average wage of league players, professional sportsmen, is EUR 25,000 a year. That's gross income. A top Premiership player could make that in a day or two.
      Precisely because of the poor liquidity around to pay salaries, the Finnish game features a good many D-list "foreign reinforcements".
      Regrettably, it seems that a fair number of them are also prone to taking a backhander.
      And whilst the top echelon of the sport, the Veikkausliiga (sponsored a little ironically by the gaming and lottery monopoly Veikkaus), has been in operation since 1990, it has not been possible to turn domestic club football into a product that would appeal to any but the hardcore football fanatics.
     
The business logic is all haywire. It does not help matters much that with only a couple of notable exceptions, the management culture that exists in the clubs has a strong whiff of the amateur about it.
      This is one of the reasons behind what happened in Rovaniemi and in Tampere.
      To make things even worse, there is in fact no name in the Finnish penal code for the criminal goings-on associated with the illegal betting market: in the case of the RoPS match-fixing scandal, the sentences were handed out for counts of the giving and receiving of bribes in commercial activities.
     
The last item on the list above, the fact that football is a summer sport in Finland, is not a joke: it actually does have some real bearing on the matter.
      Games played here in June or July appeal to Asian punters in part because there is not a great deal of footballing action on offer for the world's gamblers to get their teeth into.
      In Central and Southern Europe - for instance the Premiership in England, the Bundesliga in Germany, Italy's Serie A, or La Liga in Spain - football is a winter game, played between August and May.
     
Ultimately, however, it is a question of the laudable simplicity of betting mathematics.
      If the odds are 3:1, it matters not a jot whether the team playing is Manchester United or Tampere United or Rovaniemen Palloseura.
      Regardless of the strip the players are wearing, in any event the successful gambler will get his stake back three times over.
      In Finland the conditions for perpetrating a fraud of this kind were just optimal.
      And they still are.
     
     
In addition to the court documents and preliminary hearing transcripts and background interviews, this article made use of material gathered from FIFA and its European arm UEFA.
     
     
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 28.8.2011


Previously in HS International Edition:
  Detectives looking for former Mariehamn goalie as match-fixing case moves towards trial of Singaporean perpetrator (25.5.2011)
  Central criminal police looking into new and broader bribery connections in Finnish football (9.5.2011)
  Finland-Bolivia football friendly was cancelled over match-fixing suspicions (10.3.2011)
  Football betting scandal may escalate (18.3.2011)
  Match-fixing suspicions widen to cover ten Finnish football games (16.3.2011)

See also:
  Former Veikkausliiga side TamU receives body-blow to hopes for future (1.6.2011)
  Start of Veikkausliiga season may have to be postponed amidst wrangles over clubs´ eligibility (13.4.2011)
  Canadian author claims bribery and corruption rife in international football (2.9.2008)

ANTTI J. PELTONEN / Helsingin Sanomat