By Andrew Warshaw
June 7 – The UEFA lawyer charged with eradicating the growing scourge of match fixing in Europe is to quit after the 2012 European Championship in Poland and Ukraine.
Pierre Cornu (pictured above) is stepping down as UEFA’s chief legal counsel for integrity and regulatory affairs in the wake of a string of arrests of senior Italian players and officials.
Cornu’s imminent departure comes just weeks after FIFA’s head of security, Chris Eaton, an Australian, also stepped down to then be snapped up by the Qatar-based International Centre for Sport Security (ICSS).
Last year Cornu, a former Swiss public prosecutor, poured doubt on whether the problem of match-fixing could ever be entirely wiped out when he described it as being like drug trafficking.
Organised crime syndicates in Asia have targeted hundreds of clubs and international fixtures in recent years and Cornu had come under considerable pressure.
A recent survey of more than 3,000 Eastern European players by FIFPro, the international players’ union, found 12 per cent had been approached to fix matches.
Gianni Infantino, UEFA’s general secretary, told the Financial Times that Cornu was leaving “for family reasons” but the scale of the problem of match-fixing in Europe was highlighted last week when Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti called for the whole of Italian football to be suspended for up to three years.
Turkey, hoping to stage the European Championship finals in 2020, is the other European country most sullied by match fixing with scores of high-ranking officials arrested and named as suspects, not least jailed Fenerbahçe (pictured above) chairman Aziz Yıldırım who is still in prison awaiting a verdict.
Cornu is virtually persona non grata in Turkey where he has been accused of making false claims to the Swiss-based Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) that led to Fenerbahçe being kicked sensationally out of the Champions League.
In his report, Cornu apparently said he had been told by officials that Fenerbahçe rigged matches in the Turkish league last season and there are unconfirmed reports that UEFA later asked for his name to be removed from the case file.
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