Nov 6, 2009, 10:32 GMT
Riga - New details emerged Friday of a major betting scandal in Latvian football that saw one of the Baltic state's leading clubs barred from top-flight competition.
Guntis Indriksons, president of the Latvian Football Federation (LFF), said Friday in a newspaper interview that some bets on the outcome of matches involving the Dinaburg team had reached 100,000 euros (150,000 dollars).
FK Dinaburg, the team of Latvia's second-largest city, Daugavpils, was kicked out of the domestic league on October 5 after LFF officials said they found evidence that club officials repeatedly placed bets on the results of their own matches.
Indriksons, told the Dienas Bizness newspaper that both players and referees had told him about efforts to influence their performance on the pitch. 'Such sums ... give a rough idea about the amounts involved and how certain people were about the result,' he said.
The seriousness with which the LFF viewed the affair was reflected in the punishments it handed down. Besides excluding the club from top-level competition for the rest of the season, the LFF banned Dinaburg's general manager Oleg Gavrilov and coach Tamaz Pertija for life from Latvian football.
LFF spokesman Martins Hartmanis told the German Press Agency dpa that Dinaburg had been warned about their conduct.
'FK Dinaburg players and administrators were warned beforehand in June this year, but the federation still received information about strange bets on FK Dinaburg matches afterwards,' he said.
Dinaburg became the first scalp for a new UEFA initiative called the Betting Fraud Detection System (BFDS), launched across the continent this season. BFDS monitors all games taking place in the top two domestic divisions and cup competitions of its member national associations.
UEFA spokesman Rob Falconer told dpa: 'We have live, online betting monitoring where we can see the betting on matches, and if there are unusual or suspicious patterns, we pass this information to the national associations concerned, which was the case with Dinaburg.'
'This season BFDS has been running fully. We also have 40 disciplinary inspectors who are then specifically tasked with going off and finding more evidence,' Falconer said.
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