CNN news 2013-02-16 加文本

cnn news 2013-02-16

A stunning new report has revealed that hundreds of matches at the top level of European football were fixed. Amanda Davies has more now, Amanda.

Hi, Kristie, year, it's a major international investigation, it's been carried out into football match-fixing and it's discovered corruption in 380 professional matches across Europe, including World Cup qualifiers, European championship games and two matches in European football's flagship event, the Champion's League.

The European Union police unit Europol have been holding a press conference on Monday morning in the Netherlands to present the findings and what's been described as the biggest investigation into match-fixing ever held. The discovered 425 people involved including match officials, club officials, and players from across 15 different countries. Names of clubs and individuals haven't yet been released because of criminal investigations. And Europol director Rob Wainwright said they will be in touch with the president of the European football's governing body UEFA and described it as a sad day for European football.

"At present, we're investigating 355 suspects for more than 15 countries. The chart shows you which places the suspects come from. By far the most of them, of course, live in Germany. From November 2009 to date, we've issued 20 arrest warrants and 86 search warrants for flats and company premises in Germany, Switzerland, Slovenia, Croatia, Austria and the UK. Our investigations showed that the ring has placed bets of more than 60 million Euros, giving a profit of 8.5 million Euros. This we have been able to document more than 10 million Euros of stake money and about 5.4 million Euros, net profit from written documents obtained from the betting organizations. We have secured bribe money of more than 2.1 million Euros. We assume however that this is only the tip of the iceberg."

Well, speaking to cnn exclusively last month, the FIFA general secretary Jermoe Valke described match-fixing as a disease that could kill football, and while this investigations is the most comprehensively to be carried out, so far, there have been other corruption rackets exposed in recent times like the Italian scandal in 2005-06 that saw champion's Juventus and other clubs relegated. There's also investigations currently going on in the South Korea and South Africa, so that phrase, the tip of the iceberg, Kristie, is probably not too far wrong, sadly.

Yeah, major story, this is a global match-fixing probe, Amanda Davies reporting for us, thank you.