Putin steps up with tough Russian anti-match fixing proposals

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By Mark Baber

January 10 – President Vladimir Putin submitted a draft law to the Russian parliament on Wednesday containing a raft of measures to stamp out football match-fixing.

The bill consists of a set of amendments to the law “On Physical Culture and Sport in the Russian Federation”, and includes the most punitive set of measures to stamp out match-fixing seen anywhere to date.

Sports federations which fail to ban athletes or team officials suspected of taking bribes, or fail to report fixing cases to the police will be disbanded.

It will be against the law for players, athletes, coaches and anyone else with the ability to affect a result to place bets on their form of sport.

Bookmakers will only be able to pay out winnings to people who show identification and all transactions will be logged for tax-collection purposes.

Betting agents will have a duty to inform the police and tax authorities about large payouts.

Loopholes in existing bribery laws will be eliminated and sanctions will be toughened up.

Oleg Zhuravsky, head of the Russian National Association of Bookmakers attacked provisions in the bill giving bookmakers responsibility for collecting taxes saying: “We pay taxes, but do not know how to charge them.”

There has never been a proven case of match-fixing in Russian football but this may reflect difficulties in investigation and enforcement. At the last meeting in 2012 of the executive committee of the Russian Football Union, RFU President Nikolai Tolstoy abolished the Advisory Council for the identification of match-fixing, saying one can not “reduce everything to a match-fixing”.

The bill needs to pass three readings in the State Duma before going to the Federation Council for approval and then to the president for signing into law.

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