Following yesterday's news of the arrest of an individual on May 23rd under suspicion of money laundering related to the football industry, the Premier League (PL) CEO, Richard Scudamore, is coming under greater pressure than ever to make public the outcome of the Quest inquiry into bungs in English football. The arrest was undertaken by City of London's Police (Economic Crime Division) using information received from the Quest team.
There immediately has to be a far greater degree of openness related to this corruption. Scudamore should be releasing the details of the individuals and clubs under suspicion as happened to a far greater extent in the calciopoli crisis in Italy. Similarly to the reporting of the leak announcing the completion of Lord Steven's endeavours, the news of the arrest was delayed by over two weeks so that the tale could be spun out in the media after the completion of the season. We should exhibit some cautious optimism that this arrest is the first of many related to the case but one suspects that there will be merely a few lower level fall guys while the manipulators higher up the pyramid chuckle all the way to the bank.
Far more entertainingly, if the City of London's police are interested in money laundering, they could do far worse than checking out the Far Eastern trading operations of the major British and Gibraltan bookmakers. All firms to which Dietrological have consultative or service-based links trade on the Asian markets. We choose our business acquaintances carefully but it is a generally accepted fact within all the major trading rooms that much of this Asian trading is destined for the illegal underground Asian markets. Indeed even risk averse traders still take advantage of this systemic structure but choose to place a European broker in the chain between the analyst and the Far East market maker - here the broker is taking the illegal position and takes on the risk of non payment.
One tokenistic and media spun bailing of one peripheral individual hardly represents the upheaval to the corrupt inner machinations of the English footballing world that we might have been expecting.
The parallels with the plight of Lewis "Scooter" Libby and the untouchability of Dickie Cheney spring to mind...
© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological
