October 6 – Austria’s notorious match-fixing case has been concluded with a series of jail sentences handed down to those at the centre of a nine-year manipulation scandal.
A criminal court has sentenced former Austria international Sanel Kuljic to five years for match-fixing and physically harassing players.
A former teammate of Kuljic at Kapfenberg, Dominique Taboga, was given a three-year prison term for his role in the betting scam, which involved no fewer than 18 domestic league games in Austria’s first and second divisions from 2004 to 2013.
All top-flight games under suspicion included either Kapfenberg or Groedig — both former clubs of Taboga, who was issued a lifetime ban by the Austrian Football Federation in February.
In all eight of 10 defendants were handed prison sentences. The other two were released because of a lack of evidence. All the verdicts can be appealed.
Kuljic, who played 20 times for Austria until 2007 and retired five years later, was joint top scorer in the Austrian Bundesliga in 2005-06 for SV Ried with 15 goals but has now suffered a dramatic fall from the grace as the alleged leader of the biggest match-fixing scandal to rock Austrian football.
The nine-year-long scam ended in November, when Taboga filed charges against Kuljic, claiming his former teammate was blackmailing him over an unsettled debt.
Those punished reportedly received between 7,000 and 25,000 euros per match to influence the outcome of games, enabling their backers from Austria, Albania, Serbia and Chechnya to profit handsomely from the illegal betting scam