(Newswire.net — August 27, 2014) — Wilson Raj Perumal had boyhood dreams to be a soldier but during his school days he got a criminal record and couldn’t enlist. When he was 19-20 years old he got attracted to betting and was hooked on it ever since. “We could see all these matches around the world … I had the opportunity to target vulnerable countries … people who were prone to accept bribes,” he said. “So I registered a company and started e-mailing associations and building relationships.”
Since domestic Singapore local leagues fixing was too easy to manage, Perumal went international.
Former FIFA match-fixing investigator, Terry Steans was shocked when he was handed a FIFA case file on match-fixing in Zimbabwe in 2009.”I read that file and thought: ‘No. It can’t be. It can’t be this easy and it can’t be this prevalent. Five years later, I know, yes it was, and yes it is. But that file opened our eyes and it was to set FIFA Security, at that time, on a path to try and discover as much as we could about the fixers and how prevalent and widespread they were.”
Zimbabwe’s game was destroyed by the fixing scandal, dozens of players and officials were sanctioned, some receiving life bans while others were barred from playing for several years.”We end up with a game that lacks integrity, with the game’s reputation in tatters and with fans not really knowing what they’re watching,” Steans says.
Perumal says he achieved around a 70-80% success rate and claims to have rigged games at the Olympics, World Cup qualifiers, the women’s World Cup, the CONCACAF Gold Cup and the African Cup of Nations.
But his attempts to corrupt didn’t always go undetected by the authorities. He was jailed for 12 months for bribery, then 24 months for match-fixing, then again in 2011, when he was arrested and subsequently jailed for fixing matches in the Veikkausliiga, the country’s premier football division.
Perumal says he feels sorry for fixing some matches but then says there are “no regrets” for others.
“Football is no longer a sport. It is more like a business now. So I think we’re just trying to make money out of this business. People want to win and they will do anything just to get a result.”
Perumal said that FIFA continues to work closely with law enforcement agencies as well as the respective public authorities and other sports organizations on a national regional and global level to tackle the issue of match manipulation, but “FIFA could be doing more” he said.