Director CBI Ranjit Sinha delivering the keynote address at the two-day Workshop on the subject “Tackling Match Fixing & Corruption in Football”.
New Delhi, January 15, 2014: Taking note of the growing menace of match-fixing and allegations of corruption in sports, Director CBI today announced that the agency will soon have a Sports Frauds Investigation Unit under its Special Crime Branch.
Delivering the keynote address at the two-day Workshop on the subject “Tackling Match Fixing & Corruption in Football”, Director CBI Ranjit Sinha said that CBI will co-ordinate with other law enforcement agencies of the world and also liaise with sports federations and State police forces to build capabilities to tackle match-fixing and other corrupt practices in sports.
He also said that CBI will closely liaise & coordinate with Department of Sports, Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports to help frame policies that would build deterrence in the system. He said that Department of Sports is in the process to finalise a bill to criminalize sport frauds which will help to provide much needed teeth to various agencies to take stringent action and will stand legal scrutiny.Once the capabilities of CBI are built up, Director CBI stated, the Agency would act as resource base and help other agencies in training and education regarding the menace of corruption in sports. Highlighting the instances of match fixing, Sinha in his address said that the corruption in sports are financed and managed to a very large extent by the betting industry, both legal and illegal, with close links with worldwide crime syndicates.
Subrata Dutta, Senior Vice President of All India Football Federation and Nicholas Raudenski, Senior Manager (Security), FIFA also addressed the gathering.
The Officials of Interpol, Senior Office bearers of FIFA, All India Football Federation & State Football Associations; Representations from major Football Clubs and Delegates from the Law Enforcement Agencies are participating in the 2-day Workshop.
The two-day Workshop is a part of the “FIFA-INTERPOL Initiative” which was established to develop and implement a global training, education and prevention program-me with a focus on illegal betting and match fixing. CBI and All India Football Federation (AIFF) have also associated itself with this Initiative to help realize its goals.
Interpol’s Integrity in Sport program-me, implemented in partnership with FIFA, is a global training, education and prevention initiative with a focus on match-fixing as well as irregular and illegal betting. The objective is to raise key actors’ awareness and understanding of the phenomenon of match-fixing, the strategies used by its perpetrators and the methods to detect & counteract them. The program-me offers a number of tools to protect football from corruption, including national and regional workshops, and e-learning modules.