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MATCH-FIXING

French football rocked by match fixing scandal

Police carried out raids on numerous homes on Tuesday and arrested the presidents of two clubs, who are suspected of fixing or attempting to fix football matches in France’s second division.

French football rocked by match fixing scandal
Caen's fans celebrate their team's promotion to French Ligue 1 at the end of their match against Nimes in May 2013. But was it fixed? Photo: AFP

Among those arrested according to Le Parisien newspaper was the president of Caen, Jean-François Fortin and the president of Nîmes Olympique, Jean-Marc Conrad.

In all there were around ten arrests made, all related to the suspected fixing of matches in the 2013-2014 season.

The two men arrested are suspected of rigging a match between their two clubs in May 2013, so that it ended in a draw.

That result ensured that Caen would be promoted to France’s top division and Nîmes Olympique would avoid relegation to the third tier.

According to Le Parisien, French police are looking at several games played by Nîmes last year, suspecting that they too may also have been rigged.

Police suspicions were first raised when they were investigating a separate case against former Nîmes shareholder Serge Kasparian and his casino empire Cercle Cadet.

In a separate case, three of the directors of the club Olympique Marseille have also been arrested on Tuesday, accused of misuse of company funds in relation to the transfer of striker Andre-Pierre Gignac from Toulouse to Marseille in 2010 for €18 million.

Current club president Vincent Labrune; Jean-Claude Dassier, who held the post from 2009 to 2011 and current CEO Philip Perez are under police investigation, suspected of paying kickbacks to middlemen.

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MATCH-FIXING

Denmark makes racket over ‘match-fixing’ Chinese badminton players

The national association for badminton in Denmark says the sport’s world federation should punish Chinese players for a match at last week’s Fuzhou China Open which has been described as a “farce”.

Denmark makes racket over 'match-fixing' Chinese badminton players
China's Junhui Li, left, and Yuchen Liu, seen here during a different match, lost in the controversial quarter-final in Fuzhou. AP Photo/Aaron Favila/Ritzau Scanpix

Bo Jensen, director of Badminton Denmark, wants the Badminton World Federation (BWF) to take action after seeing footage of a quarter final match in which He Jiting and Ta Qiang defeated Li Junhui and Liu Yuchen in three sets.

“I am giving my support to the criticism. This is cheating, it’s match-fixing and we can’t accept it,” Jensen said to TV2 Sport.

“In our context, this is just as bad as doping, and it must be punished because if it is not, we will damage the sport’s reputation amongst fans and the many sponsors that are making huge investments at the moment,” he added.

Several Danish badminton players are reported to have been present during the match. Doubles pair Mads Pieler Kolding and Mads Conrad-Petersen lodged a complaint with tournament organisers following the match about the way it had been played.

Another player, Hans-Kristian Vittinghus, later posted an update on Facebook in which he compared the match to a scandal during the 2012 Olympic Games in London, when eight players from China, South Korea and Indonesia were disqualified for deliberately trying to lose.

“This was a complete farce of a match which made me think of the London Olympics when 4 pairs deliberately tried to lose their matches. I kid you not, it was this bad,” Vittinghus wrote, citing errors in play that “just (don’t) happen at this level”.

“Difficult to get hard evidence, but if you have watched a bare minimum of world class badminton, you’d know what just happened,” he also wrote.

The BWF told TV2 Sport that it would not comment on the issue prior to receiving a report from the tournament’s organisers.

READ ALSO: Danish badminton star wins Chinese fans with Mandarin skills