European football's governing body UEFA has called in police organisation Europol to investigate possible match-fixing by Asian betting syndicates in top-flight European football, Der Spiegel magazine is reporting in it's Monday edition.
According to the magazine five UEFA officials visited the Europol headquarters in The Hague during early November to handover a 96-page dossier outling suspicions that games were being fixed. This covered a total of 26 games, including three in the third preliminary round of the Champions League, two in the UEFA Cup and one in the qualifiers for Euro 2008.
Fifteen of the suspect games were played during the current season with the other 11 between July 2005 and November 2006, Der Spiegel said. They mostly concerned teams from eastern and southern Europe notably Bulgaria, Georgia, Serbia and Croatia but also the Baltic states in the north. The magazine said the UEFA report detailed millions of euros being pocketed by Asian betting syndicates based on the results of these games.