Manus Manum Lavat - Homage To A Whistleblower

On October 16th, Daphne Caruana Galizia was murdered as a result of her investigative journalism revealing that Malta had evolved into a mafia state https://daphnecaruanagalizia.com/.

Known as the "one-woman Wikileaks", Caruana Galizia had tirelessly exposed corruption on the crime island for three decades, and she continued her work after receiving the first threats on her life in 1996. Two weeks prior to her death, Caruana Galizia had filed a complaint to police after receiving further threats to her safety.

Daphne was that most-feared creature of our contemporary world of corruption, a solitary decider.

Her final blog entry read: "There are crooks everywhere you look now. The situation is desperate."

Her death changes everything.
Her life was not for nothing.

There are currently three primary leads in the investigation into the assassination of Caruana Galizia:

* Her final investigative project addressed a diesel smuggling operation between Libya and Italy orchestrated by Sicilian mafia. By personnel and evidence, this illicit trade is linked to former Maltese international footballer Darren Debono.

* A cigarette smuggling cartel based in Cyprus and Malta linked to senior Maltese politicians and businessmen that leaves many unanswered questions.

* The  'Ndrangheta had a number of their betting licenses revoked in Malta after Caruana Galizia's exposure of the infiltration of  the Maltese gambling sector by Italian mafia.

Both the Sicilian mafia and the 'Ndrangheta are known for exhibiting their cowardice via massive car bombings - think Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino in the former and see recent Maltese history for the latter.

In this post we are specifically going to focus on the third of these options as members of our extended network worked on the meta-analysis of bookmaker-based corruption in Malta.
However, it should be noted that numerous politicians, businessmen, mafia operatives, tax evaders and money launderers wanted this whistleblower dead and some threads of our narrative will expose such individuals for the financial terrorists that they are.
_________________________________________________________________________________

Daphne Caruana Galizia was one of the lead journalists analysing the Panama Papers which revealed extensive offshore tax evasion by our global elite at just one offshore operation Mossack Fonseca. Among those exposed were numerous senior figures in Maltese business and politics including prime minister Joseph Muscat, his chief of staff Keith Schembri and former health and energy minister Konrad Mizzi. For example, Muscat's wife is the beneficial owner of a company in Panama and large sums of money were moved between there and the Aliyev proto-fascist state of Azerbaijan while senior members of the Labour Party had money hidden through a web of companies in Panama and trusts in New Zealand.
Caruana Galizia's final blog post focused on Schembri and the former leader of the opposition Simon Busuttil.

These leaders are responsible for the development of these gruesome conditions.

Sueddeutsche Zeitung: "Multinational companies are passing on profits to their Maltese subsidiaries, which then pretend to be doing business on the island. But in fact, all they do there is pay less tax ('letterbox companies'). According to calculations by the newspaper Malta Today, those European member states in which the profits were really generated lose 3.5 to 4 billion euros a year in taxes because of this system... Unconditional discretion and sedated bureaucracy: that is what protects the very special holiday paradises like Malta."

Malign and criminal interests have turned Malta into a mafia state...
... a mafia state tax haven within the EU.
It is a strange state of affairs when the EU offers subsidies to a member state which deprives other member states of tax revenues.
Much Italian mafia activity relating to money laundering has been exported to the island in recent years following numerous crackdowns by the authorities in Italy. There have been 15 mafia style assassinations and car bombings in the last decade prior to Caruana Galizia's murder.

The Maltese government has offered a one million euro reward and full protection for anybody with information regarding this murder although why any sane human being would trust the words of these state charlatans is another matter entirely. Matthew Caruana Galizia (one of Daphne's three sons) doesn't trust the police to properly investigate her death stating "... there has been a takedown of the rule of law here. There has been a capture of the state by corrupt and criminal corporations. The institutions do not work. There is a climate of impunity." Another son Paul adds that "if the government doesn't want to be investigated, it won't be investigated." The family have called for the resignations of the Prime Minister, the Senior Police Commissioner and the Attorney General.

Julian Assange and David Thake have also set up rewards for information leading to a conviction.

Island locations have become the crime centres of choice for global mafia networks and corruption merchants. Whether it is bookmakers in Singapore, Gibraltar, Isle of Man etc, or tax evasion in Jersey, Cayman Islands, British Virgin Isles etc, or the development of mafia client states in Cyprus and Malta etc, the island with its defined boundaries geographically, legally and financially is the ideal locus.

Aside from the heinous nature of this crime, Caruana Galizia's death should also serve as a warning to what is happening in numerous other EU countries where mafia are influencing the state.
In Sicily, Nino di Matteo has unearthed collusion between the Cosa Nostra and deep levels of the Italian state and, as a consequence, is under armed protection 24/7 as Tito Riina has announced a death sentence from the safety of his jail cell. Meanwhile Roberto Saviano, who spent a decade investigating Italian mafia, claims that the UK is the most corrupt country in the world. According to Saviano, the financial services industry in the City of London facilitates the system that backs up this claim and Football is Fixed's evidences of Deep State influenced systemic corruption in British football shares exactly the same template of corruption as that in the Square Mile of misery.

The mafia never kills non-mafiosi just for vendetta. There is always another aim - to eliminate a person who has discovered something that must not be discovered. When a mafia infects a state, it is still the state that orders the murders. But the mafia, above all, is an entity that wishes to exhibit power in place of the state.

A quote that we have utilised before from Sicilian magistrate Nino di Matteo sums up the situation: "We live in a mafia state - a state that, in order to preserve the status quo, has to remove whistleblowers who want justice. We want to know the reason for the silence of the mainstream media - why are they frightened to the degree they become accomplices in (and beneficiaries of) the corruption? We must rebel against this system and this mafia method."
_________________________________________________________________________________

Malta has a population of 437,000 (smaller than the city of Stoke) and yet has over 500 betting operations housed on the island. The betting sector is worth 1.2 billion euros and represents 12% of GDP. Malta was the first country in Europe to ease the entry process for online gambling firms in 2004. According to Europol, the 'Ndrangheta uses this online betting hub for large scale money laundering related to their domination of the global cocaine trade (the 'Ndrangheta makes an estimated 26.4 billion euros from cocaine annually).
Caruana Galizia: "Money launderers are being forced out of Italy's gaming market because regulation there has become so tight in the fight against organised crime."

In June 2017, as a result of research by Caruana Galizia, 1128Bet had their license suspended due to Italian mafia infiltration.
Previously, several members of the 'Ndrangheta were arrested in Malta in 2015 and extradited to Italy because they were caught laundering money through remote gaming companies.
Betuniq and BetSolution4U had their licenses suspended on July 22nd 2015 having been undertaking money laundering in Malta for four years. But these suspensions were only due to the actions of Italian police and not any Maltese authority. Two billion euros of assets were seized from the 'Ndrangheta.
In transcripts of telephone conversations between two Camorra clans, Bastian Dalli (the criminal brother of former Malta Cabinet Minister and European Commissioner John Dalli) is described as "the brother of the Maltese Prime Minister" and is named as the Camorra contact for Malta - "he is the one you should contact to set up a gaming company in Malta for money laundering purposes". In Italy, 1500 betting shops, 82 online gambling sites, 60 other companies and quantities of real estate were seized as evidence of this mafia-led tax evasion.
John Dalli's henchman Iosif Galea, a former employee of the Lotteries and Gaming Authority (a precursor to the Malta Gaming Authority) was the key official for BetSolutions4U. When this scandal broke he left the Malta Gaming Authority (MGA) for a comfortable position within government.
A regulator was responsible for the corruption rather than working against it.

In November 2009, Italian police were closing in on Bet1128 in the UK. This company was owned by ParadiseBet. The family of Vito Martiradonna, who was convicted of being affiliated to Sacra Corona Unita in 2007, had hidden assets by taking advantage of Malta's lax online gambling regulations. ParadiseBet successfully sold 1128Bet and 11 other assets to Malta-based CenturionBet for 10 million pounds - a figure that does not appear anywhere in ParadiseBet's accounts. Michele Martiradonna was the main shareholder in ParadiseBet and the sale of the assets left nothing in the UK for the police to seize (https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/04191516/officers).

Research by the Organised Crime and Corruption Research Project (OCCRP) showed that the Martiradonna family were linked to CenturionBet (and other related betting companies operating from the same Maltese address). CenturionBet's ownership moved repeatedly between different British Virgin Isles companies with the stated beneficial owner being Antonio Buontempo (a former employee of ParadiseBet).
In the summer of 2017, the licenses of CenturionBet and 1128Bet were finally suspended by the entirely inadequate MGA. Operation 'Jonny', an Italian anti-mafia sting carried out in May 2017, linked CenturionBet to the 'Ndrangheta who earned 1.3 million pounds over 18 months after the betting company allowed access to its systems to Kroton Games (another 'Ndrangheta company) who successfully laundered huge amounts of money via the structure.
Bet1128 were a rogue company from their formation in 2008 and the strategy from day one was money laundering and the refusal to honour winning wagers by punters (https://www.sportsbookreview.com/search/?q=bet1128 and https://www.sbo.net/scam-sportsbooks/bet1128-paradise-bet/).

The laissez faire approach of the MGA has attracted all the usual major European betting firms to the island including Ladbrokes and Betfair. A SIGMA (Summit in I-Gaming in Malta) press release in 2014 gushed over the "... strategic confluence of financial, legal, technological and cultural factors which successive administrations moulded over the years, and which ultimately tipped the odds in favour of gaming companies deciding to locate here [in Malta]".
_________________________________________________________________________________

Time to focus a little bit more on Keith Schembri, the chief of staff to PM Joseph Muscat. Schembri's remote gaming interests allowed him to channel gaming profits into secret companies in tax havens.

In April 2016, the Australian Financial Review focused on Schembri's links with gaming companies (as well as his involvement in Camorra and Cosa Nostra-backed recycling and waste management in India and Dubai - a favoured money laundering structure). Schembri completed a full house by the benefits he gained from 'Ndrangheta control of betting on the island.

A chief of staff in any government should not engage in business interests at all let alone interests linked to all three primary Italian mafia entities.

Daphne Caruana Galizia's exposure of Schembri was backed up by the Financial Investigation and Analysis Unit (FIAU), a Maltese government agency, which as a result of this support was left without a director for seven months hence halting all money laundering investigations against senior members of both the main political parties on the island. Under its previous director, Manfred Galdes, the FIAU had closely investigated Schembri and his secret offshore dealings in the British Virgin Isles, Gibraltar, Cyprus and Panama, and bank accounts in other territories. The illicit trusts were used, among other things, to launder money received as kickbacks from Russian mafia to gain Maltese passports (at a cost of 650,000 euros fee to Maltese government plus 150,000 euros invested in government bonds and purchase of a property of minimum value 350,000 euros).
After Galdes resigned, purely by chance so did the Police Commissioner, the latter being replaced by a Muscat ally, Lawrence Cutajar.
Caruana Galizia: "... the chances that the police will do their duty in acting on the investigation results presented to them by the FIAU recede even further. At this point, it is safe to assume that there is a very high risk of the FIAU investigation report into the Prime Minister's chief of staff and Minister Konrad Mizzi, that is in the possession of the Police Commissioner, being destroyed or otherwise disposed of."
It should be noted that the FIAU is an investigatory body with no power to prosecute and is chaired by the Attorney General "who is in a conflicting position in his role as legal counsel to the government" which is under investigation. Whitewash.
_________________________________________________________________________________

Claudio Antonelli and Gianluigi Nuzzi from their book 'Blood Ties: The Calabrian Mafia' interviewed former 'Ndrangheta member Pasquale Barreca about collusion between the Camorra, 'Ndrangheta, Cosa Nostra and the state: "... the most important point remains the union between the Calabrian 'Ndrangheta and the Sicilian mafia in sending out these signals [requesting dialogue with the state]. through interlocutors, including members of state organs, it is certainly possible to create the necessary mediation... In my day Cosa Nostra had far more power at the political level, without a doubt. Today that's no longer the case. The Calabrian bosses have found a way into the organs of government... the 'Ndrangheta has penetrated deep into the social, and even more the political, fabric, by consolidating the economic power it has gained."

Italian anti-mafia investigators are in Malta helping to uncover the truth behind the assassination of Daphne Caruana Galizia and organised crime links between Malta, Italy and, potentially, Libya are being explored. The online gambling, cigarette smuggling and illicit diesel rackets are the primary focuses of investigation.

Former Maltese international footballer Darren Debono (who played 52 times for his country) was arrested on Lampedusa relating to the diesel smuggling operation the day after Daphne Caruana Galizia's murder after having his phone tapped for two years by Italian authorities (http://www.maltatoday.com.mt/news/national/81734/italian_authorities_tapped_darren_debonos_phone_for_two_years_before_arrest#.Wfh3MFu0PIU) and (https://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20171022/local/anti-mafia-squad-in-malta-italian-senator-excluded-from-delegation.660993).

Debono played against England in a fixed Friendly International in 2000 (an England squad including Michael Owen, Steve McManaman, Robbie Fowler, Martin Keown, Phil and Gary Neville, and managed by Kevin Keegan). England won 2-1 in a non-trying event with keeper Richard Wright giving away two penalties. Wright is represented, unsurprisingly, by the Stellar Agency.

The other avenue for the police relates to Silvio Debono (centre of the back row in the above photo) and the following three posts from Caruana Galizia's 'Running Commentary' blog give some cryptic background to this particular piece of Maltese corruption
a) https://daphnecaruanagalizia.com/2017/03/breakingsilvio-debono-panama-papers-company-investigation-maltas-tax-authorities/
b) https://daphnecaruanagalizia.com/2017/03/wouldnt-bother-libel-suits-lou-hardrock-silvio-think-cigarettes-cyprus/
c) https://daphnecaruanagalizia.com/2017/03/politicians-need-read/
_________________________________________________________________________________

Daphne Caruana Galizia had proof that political, business and criminal elites are one and the same entity in much the same way as Football is Fixed would describe the systemic template undermining and corrupting British football - there are very senior members of government, rogue Deep State operators, mafia groups, tarnished or coerced individuals, certain businesses using mafia methods to garner market (and corruption) control, all interacting in an environment where the mainstream media actually helps to orchestrate the scam.

And all of these corrupted structures feed through to the sport itself.

Take Juventus.

On September 25th, Juventus club president Andrea Agnelli was banned for one year for selling tickets to hard-core ultras and admitted meeting Rocco Dominello (an 'Ndrangheta mafia man who has now been jailed for eight years). The revenue streams arising from the scalping of tickets went straight into Calabrian mafia coffers - the president of the Serie A champions profited a mafia entity.
Less than a month later, Juventus were proud to announce a regional sponsorship deal with SE Asian online betting firm F66.com.
And all this after the incredibly suspicious betting patterns linked to Juve's alleged underperformance in the Champions League Final against Real Madrid.

Or take ################ an English team who, already under external rogue ownership, were sold to a Chinese entity operating through Malta with no company website and seemingly no history for any of the individuals involved. And, interestingly, the UK broadsheet that reported these links altered the article with no addenda at the conclusion - the paper withdrew the news and turned it into fake.
Why would a UK establishment newspaper do this thing?

Or take the fixed Malta versus England friendly.

These holistic structures are becoming a geopolitical football norm - the Albanian mafia influencing Austrian football (according to our research and in the opinion of a senior former FIFA man), Russians controlling the football in Cyprus and a whole array of bookmakers scrambling for the ultimate control of markets via rogue referees and players around the continent.

Football club owners.
Rogue footballers.
Mafia entities..
Money laundering.
Matchfixing events.
Online betting companies.
Links between Malta, Gibraltar, Italy and the UK.

Football.
Mafia.
Betting.

Alain Badiou: "For as Saint-Just asks: 'What do those who want neither Virtue nor Terror want?' His answer is well known: they want corruption."

The gambling and money laundering matrices of the UK and Malta want Terror and Corruption.

May the astonishing Daphne Caruana Galizia rest in a deserved peace and may her murderer(s) be brought to swift justice.

If her killer(s) have not been arrested by the time our forthcoming book is published, 25% of all profits will be added to Julian Assange's fund.
_________________________________________________________________

© Football is Fixed 2006-2017
________________________________________________________________________________________

Something Is Rotten In The State Of Britain - Bookmakers

At the beginning of November Tracey Crouch, the Conservative Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Sport and Civil Society, is to produce a long-awaited review of the betting industry in Britain under the auspices of the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS).

It is thought that the primary focuses will be on Fixed Odds Betting Terminals (FOBTs), football-based advertising and shirt sponsorship by bookmakers with the Treasury unsurprisingly opposing any regulation of the latter two arenas due to their tax take and other revenue streams linked to the bookmaking fraternity.

Although FOBTs, advertising and shirt sponsorship are issues, they pale into insignificance in comparison with the fundamental control of British football by global mafiosi and rogue states.

A more enlightened governmental report might look at the following:

* FOBTs - the crack cocaine of gambling - target problem addicts in mainly working class areas with the option of betting thousands of pounds per hour. Betting shops in Glasgow Central, for example, generate an average profit of £150,000 per annum from these machines.

* Ground, shirt, club, league, cup and football association sponsorship by bookmakers is an issue. Of even greater concern are the numerous clubs owned (or partially owned) by bookmakers, professional gamblers and/or gambling consortia e,g. Stoke City, Brighton & Hove Albion, Glasgow Celtic, Leicester City and Brentford. There are also numerous clubs with hidden or opaque ownership or with owners who appear from nowhere with no apparent 'history' e.g. Bournemouth, Northampton Town, West Bromwich Albion, Wolverhampton Wanderers, Oxford United, Birmingham City, Cardiff City, Sheffield Wednesday and Reading. Former owners of questionable merit include Arcadi Gaydamek (an arms dealer at Portsmouth), Thaksin Shinawatra (a corrupt state politician at Manchester City) and Steve McManaman's corrupt former business partner Carson Yeung at Birmingham City.

* Football 'experts' and bookmaker 'ambassadors' provide disinformation on Sky Sports, BT Sport and BBC to drive leisure money in erroneous directions to the marked financial benefit of insiders trading the opposite way at an improved price generated by media lies.

* Referees and key players (particularly goalkeepers) who are either coerced or work voluntarily with bookmakers and mafia groups to enable matchfixing, insider trading and an utter destruction of the integrity of the game are at the coalface of corruption. One current England player was reported to police by his club over allegedly throwing matches to cover his £1.3 million gambling debt, for instance. He still performs for his club in the Premier League each week (albeit for a different club).

* Bookmakers promote their products by referring to your 'winnings'. But this advertising tactic is a complete misnomer - only a handful of betting companies allow winning accounts unless of course such winning accounts are linked to inside information and insider trading - that is a very different kettle of fishy event! But, for the average bettor, you are not allowed to win - betting is a voluntary taxation.

That is the game we now have, killed off by corruption, dark money, dark pools, global mafia and rogue Deep State operations with gambling machines stripping the remainder of any wealth a problem gambler might still possess at the end of this charade.

The aim of this Conservative government post-Brexit is to create a Singapore-style financialised economy linked to far-right economic edifices like The Atlantic Bridge (TAB) created by neoliberal ideologue Liam Fox and his chums at the Heritage Foundation. It somehow seems markedly apt that the most powerful bookmaker of the last quarter century (who hails from Singapore) is one of the key operators behind this financialisation of European football at both club and betting market level.

The game of football is being killed by the markets and there is no regulation other than self-regulation and voluntary codes. And the lack of any meaningful regulation in the public markets is nothing compared to the invisibility of the underground dark pool markets where institutional market operators determine match outcomes among themselves. These entities constantly revert to a strategy of  "trust us to regulate ourselves" but you cannot trust greedy psychopaths in a regulation-free environment.

Clubs, agents, players, administrators and referees are able to earn considerably more with a move over to the dark side of corruption. Some individual matches have £10 billion global betting market volume while a global consortium of insiders, mafia and state operators generated an estimated £6 billion - £24 billion from the alleged fairy tale of the Leicester City title triumph.

Free market financial fascism is fixing football.

There is currently a long-awaited pseudo-war between the UK government and the bookmaking industry over the exploitation of gamblers and the promotion of gambling to children alongside the inevitable corruption of the beautiful game.

The global consortium behind the entirely corrupted Leicester City title triumph in 2015/16 received implicit support at state and institutional level.
Due to the systemic nature of this matchfixing, some of these ill-gotten gains ended up in Deep State coffers (a point which our legal team raised forcefully last year with George Osborne when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer).
If the current template of corruption continues into the future, the game is over as fans won't attend and all but the most addicted of gamblers tend not to bet on sports that they know to be fixed.
The government is hence between a rock and a hard place having to choose between short-termism and massive illicit profits in the immediate window or a more regulated strategic approach that generates less revenue per annum but which creates such income over a longer period of time and which doesn't destroy the sport in the process.

If the latter were the option chosen and the aim was to ensure that the bookmaking sector was properly regulated and insider trading on football matches made illegal, the Deep State returns would be markedly lessened and any offset via an increased strategic tax take for the Treasury wouldn't dent this shortfall.
This explains why the Treasury is reluctant to target the bookmaking sector...
... as the Treasury benefits proximately but allegedly indirectly from matchfixing and corruption.

A structure exists where shirt sponsorship, league sponsorship, ludicrous amounts of advertising before, during and after the game, the provision of enhanced trading facilities for insider professional gamblers and matchfixers while, in parallel, the vast majority of bookmakers refuse to allow winning accounts from all other clients and disinformational advertising persuades mug punters to part with their wealth on match options that have virtually no chance of occurrence.

Bookmakers are rotten.

Inversion capitalism is creating a vast transfer of wealth from fans, supporters, viewers and bettors to government, bookmakers, advertisers, insider matchfixing networks and the media companies Sky Sports, BT Sport (and by association the BBC). This financialisation of football is destroying the sport (as witnessed by the falling television subscriptions and match attendances) - the sport of British football is being asset stripped with the complicity of areas of our Deep State.

With the government currently addressing the gambling industry, the deputy leader of the Labour Party Tom Watson (who is also Shadow Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport) wants to ban bookmakers from sponsoring football shirts believing that this will somehow undermine the hidden epidemic of gambling addiction in Britain. A future Labour government would encourage the FA to enforce a ban on such shirt sponsorship and would regulate if/when the governing body dragged their feet (the FA have already terminated a £4 million per year sponsorship deal with Ladbrokes but this bookmaker still sponsors just about the entire football sectors in Scotland and Eire).
Watson states: "There must be no stitch-up to help the gambling industry avoid tighter restrictions on advertising."

Of course, it was New Labour under Tony Blair who undertook to deregulate the betting industry in the first place resulting in this explosion of media advertising, the ensuing corruption in the game and the creation of online betting scams like PartyGaming (who were briefly a FTSE100 company based on their fleecing of mugs at rigged virtual poker tables). It was also New Labour that bowed to the advances of the Association of Major Levy Payers (AMLP) to continue the deregulation of licensed betting offices (LBOs) that had been enacted a year before Blair came to office. The AMLP was primarily constituted of Ladbrokes, William Hill and Coral. Although fiercely competitive, the British bookmaking sector operate as a fragmented cartel to protect mutually beneficial holistics when the need rises.

Gambling is an addiction. There are an estimated 2 million people who are problem gamblers or at risk of becoming so in the UK and most of these individuals are persuaded by wall-to-wall advertising and extensive sponsorship to become/remain addicted by an industry that cleared £13 billion profit last year. 430,000 have a serious gambling addiction in the country while bookies only return £10 million to help with problem gambling. But £13 billion is just the tip of the iceberg - the real profit from the industry is much greater as dark pool trading is both entirely non-regulated and underground - the profits are hidden and no taxes are paid to the state.

£1.4 billion has been spent by bookmakers over a five year period in advertising (primarily to the advantage of the coffers of BT Sport and Sky Sports). None of this advertising was allowed prior to Blair's government allowing the industry to regulate itself via a voluntary code of operation.

Currently nine Premier League teams have their shirts sponsored by bookmakers and there are 16 more teams in the Championship and League One - that is 37% of all clubs in the top three leagues. This brought in nearly £50 million to these clubs this season.

The full background to the current scenario exists in these four articles from The Guardian newspaper (although it should be noted that a matchfixing football agent has considerable clout over the output of the paper's football section!)
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/sep/06/ban-betting-firms-football-shirts-labour-gambling
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/sep/17/betting-firms-broadcasters-fund-addiction-awareness-gambling
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/sep/26/labour-betting-firms-levy-gambling-addiction
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/sep/29/ladbrokes-investigation-payday-loans-fobt

The business strategy is hardly new. In the old days LBOs were always located in close proximity to public houses promoting mug betting under the influence of alcohol in much the same way that undertakers gravitate to the locale of hospitals. Nowadays, many people watch live matches in these pubs but don't even have to leave their seat to register their voluntary taxation to the layers via phone apps that are often promoted by the club they support - Celtic, for example, signed a five year deal with Dafabet in 2015 to promote the products of this company, a company that has been regarded as problematical in the ethical department by Sportsbook Review (who monitor betting sites).

In Australia, gambling advertisements are banned during sporting events pre-watershed and action is taken against betting professionals undertaking pitchsiding at events (where bettors utilise time delays in market response globally due to Australia's location on the planet). These are small steps in the right direction but by no means enough to end the scourge of bookmaking wrecking sports.

Children should not be wandering round with clothing extolling the virtues of underground South East Asian bookmakers. The exposure of gambling products to young people is even greater on the BBC than on the dedicated sports channels. The percentage of Match of the Day where gambling logos are on screen is particularly high and the talking head experts are spouting the messages of their bookmaking and football agent backers in any intervening period.

Let's look at the betting exchanges for a working example of the bookmaker mindset. At companies like Betfair, Betdaq and Matchbook, you place your bets and they are matched, allegedly, with punters thinking the opposite way. The winner pays commission on their winnings (up to 5%) but this commission is regressive. Professionals and insider traders betting with these companies receive a much lower commission rate for loyalty as the exchanges don't want to lose access to this privileged information as they form their markets around such knowledge. Once the outcome is in the market pre-match, the betting exchanges do not want winning bets as they would rather match themselves internally against the wrong positions traded with the company. In some cases, these manipulations go further. At one betting exchange linked to a British club, the club 'representative' would place erroneous trades at his own betting company to move the price globally so that he could trade elsewhere at much higher volumes at a markedly improved price - "if ############## is betting against ############## then we had better mimic his position" is the fallacious cry in the trading room".

Take the massive 'Cash Out' campaign undertaken by the British bookmaking industry over the last two seasons. This was to persuade leisure punters to close out winning positions early to the significant benefit of the bookmakers and betting exchanges who simply 'took on' the trade on the punters behalf but to the benefit of their own bottom line. The linked article below shows what happened to one punter who stood to win £100,000 on the Leicester City title victory but was persuaded by advertising to hand over 70% of his winnings to a bookmaker who knew that Leicester City were nailed on title winners https://synomic.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/snitching-cincuenta-y-dos_7.html.

And, incidentally, the Leicester City title win was based on doping (the club moving from the least fit in the season prior to the title win to second fittest in their fairy tale season) and referee bias (in the last three seasons Leicester City have been the most favoured team by Premier League referees by some distance).

Perhaps this is a case of 'King Power Corrupts, Absolute King Power Corrupts Absolutely' and remember that this is the same King Power who are under investigation back in Thailand over massive fraud to the tune of billions of pounds. Yet another fit and proper owner in the Premier League.

A couple of weeks ago, the main match on Sky Super Sunday was Chelsea versus Arsenal...
... the match outcome was known in the dark pool markets pre-match.

Of equivalent interest, a couple of the talking heads who share their wisdom with viewers pre-match were betting against Chelsea even though their analyses on behalf of television subscribers were questioning how there was any possible outcome other than a Chelsea victory.

Similarly, members of the BT Sports crew provided disinformation opposite to their market positions prior to last Saturday's game between Chelsea and Manchester City.

These individuals are multi-millionaires who owe their wealth to the sport but have elected post-career to sell out to murky matchfixing groups and to complicit media companies to take even more money from fans via disinformation and an exploitation of the pseudo-religious belief fans have in their teams - "if ############# tells us Arsenal have no chance of avoiding defeat then he must be right as he is one of our all-time heroes".

Currently, the British game is besmirched with turf wars - BT Sport, BBC and the Deep State versus Sky Sports and the Murdochracy, a fragmented cartel of British football agents versus Gestifute, Ladbrokes Coral versus William Hill versus Betfair Paddy Power versus South East Asian layers. Additionally, the mafia groups who are corrupting football understand that this last window before the onset of Video Assistant Referees (VAR) is their final opportunity to clean up without obstruction. The widespread media campaign in Britain against VAR is an example of this strategy with fallacious concepts like 'the final decision must be in the hands of the referee' a guarantee of future matchfixing ad finitum. In the Bundesliga and Serie A where VAR has been introduced this season there are far far fewer games determined by referee 'error'. But even these versions of VAR don't go far enough - why aren't managers able to request a review of a decision as in tennis and cricket? And, meanwhile, Sportradar a company that is supposed to highlight instances of matchfixing but has a conflict of interest in that it is funded by the bookmakers who often undertake and always benefit from matchfixing is regarded as something of substance, of proper oversight. As a former head of investigations at FIFA pointed out to us, it is surprising that he and Football is Fixed know of fixed games that somehow slip below the radar of Sportradar - publicly at least.

Magistrate Nino di Matteo on collusion between Sicilian mafia and the Italian state: "We live in a mafia state - a state that, in order to preserve the status quo, has to remove whistleblowers who want justice. We want to know the reason for the silence of the mainstream media - why are they frightened to the degree they become accomplices in (and beneficiaries of) the corruption? We must rebel against this system and this mafia method."

In particular, the primary loci of corruption and matchfixing in British football resides with bookmakers and football agents. Both are heavily linked with mafia-style entities in Europe and Asia and with Deep State operatives within government.

The situation in football is remarkably similar to the arms trade where illicit state sponsored deals like Al Yamamah result in state terrorism, the destabilisation of whole regions of the world and result in the deaths and mutilations of huge numbers of innocent victims (often children). Replace guns with footballs and the scam is the same.

Consequently, any peripheral tinkering with FOBTs and shirt sponsorship is not going to seriously impact upon these systemic corruption infrastructures. Removing betting companies logos from football shirts is a fiddle while Rome burns.

The betting industry alongside the advertising companies and the media companies who bring the sport to screen are offering a paltry £8 million to fund a gambling awareness campaign to educate punters about the perils of trading in corrupt markets. £8 million is a small percentage of the amounts bet by bookmakers on just one game in the dark pool poker tables of corruption where match outcomes are determined. It is small change and should not be allowed to undermine a thorough review of the criminalities that are destroying football.

If Labour really want to confront this systemic corruption (and, as an aside, save the people's game), they should be focusing on the role of Deep State operatives in the fixing of British football. Once in government Labour should implement onerous regulation regarding betting markets, insider trading, matchfixing, doping, referee selection, football agents and the transfer markets. UK Anti-Doping should be disbanded and replaced by an entity that is not captured by the industry and, moreover, Labour should establish UK Anti-Matchfixing to address a situation where the majority of Premier League games are matchfixed in each round of games. Fans need to be made fully aware of what has happened to their favourite sport.

It is only a matter of time before this house of cards of football corruption comes tumbling down.
If Labour were behind this campaign to save the people's game, a period of government would be guaranteed despite the manipulative gerrymandering that attempts to keep these charlatans in power in perpetuity.

This DCMS review might be the last chance to save football. Labour should wise up and hit this government where it hurts - in their acquiescence in the corruption of our national sport.
_________________________________________________________________

'Football is Fixed' is a global network established in the mid-nineties to save football from the mafia.

Our network consists of whistleblowers from within the football and betting sectors. We receive threats and our existences are based on sousveillance and enhanced security. Several of our network exist entirely underground for safety reasons. There are many other people in the sport who know about certain aspects of the corruptions at play but who are too scared to confront the mafia groups that orchestrate these outrages.

We will soon be releasing a book exposing the corrupt matrices that underpin corruption in football.
You can register your interest in this limited edition book at meawhistleblower.com.
_________________________________________________________________

© Football is Fixed 2006-2017
________________________________________________________________________________________