By David Gold
September 11 – A bill to toughen match-fixing laws in Russian football is set to be submitted to the lower house of the country’s Parliament later this year.
The news was revealed by Alexander Zhukov, the deputy speaker of the Russian state Duma and President of the Russian Olympic Committee, in a bid to clamp down on a spate of match-fixing problems in the country’s domestic game (pictured top).
Federal Audit Chamber chairman Sergei Stepashin proposed laws to make match-fixing illegal earlier this year, and the measure has been supported by Sports Minister Vitaly Mutko.
The Russian Football Union (RFU) has incorporated a match-fixing committee to tackle the problem.
“In lots of countries there are precedents whereby the punishment for these kinds of thing is not only disqualification but treated as a crime,” said Zhukov (pictured below, right, alongside Vitaly Mutko, centre, and Russian President Vladimir Putin).
“The bill in which sanctions are toughened is already prepared.
“The absence of hard sanctions does not allow us to investigate these incidents to the end.”
Match-fixing has been a prime concern of FIFA and UEFA – world and European football’s governing bodies, respectively – in recent years, with scandals affecting countries including Finland, South Korea and China.
In the last year there have been two particularly high-profile scandals, in Turkey and Italy.
In Turkey a number of clubs, officials and players were under investigation for allegedly conspiring to fix games in the 2010-11 season, with that term’s champions Fenerbahçe the main team under scrutiny.
In Italy a number of clubs, including Serie A sides Siena and Sampdoria, have this year been given points deductions as a result of the calcioscommesse scandal.
That saga also led to the 10-month suspension of Antonio Conte (pictured above, centre), the coach of Serie A champions Juventus, following charges related to his time at Siena.
According to FIFPro, the world players’ union, Eastern Europe has a particularly significant problem with match-fixing.
The organisation’s Black Book statistics show that 43.5 per cent of players in Russia are aware of match-fixing compared with 23.6 per cent across Eastern Europe as a whole.
However, few accusations are ever upheld by authorities, but the issue, like racism, is a key concern for Russian officials working to clean up football in the country ahead of the FIFA World Cup it hosts in 2018.
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