Belgian police have arrested 13 people as part of an investigation into a Belgian/Armenian criminal organisation, which it said has been corrupting Belgian tennis players competing in Futures and Challenger tennis events since 2014. The investigation was supported by Europol and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), which said that house searches and interviews had also been conducted in the US, Bulgaria, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Slovakia.

‘The Armenian-Belgian criminal organisation consisted of several individuals, each of whom had a specific task, including anonymously moving large sums of money abroad’, read a statement from Europol. ‘Material of evidentiary value, including many mobile phones, computers and cash, was seized’.

Belgium’s Federal Judicial Police conducted 21 searches across Belgium after receiving information from the country’s Gambling Commission. ‘In the course of 2015, the Gambling Commission received several reports from various betting establishments which made it clear that many people of Armenian origin residing in our country are allegedly guilty of match-fixing on the tennis court’, read a statement from Belgium’s Public Ministry. ‘Almost all the suspects match the same profile (no income, no job, insolvent, etc.). In accordance with clear instructions, they would use money made available to them in betting offices to capitalise on lower division matches taking place abroad, for which earnings are not very high (US$5,000 – $15,000). There is usually no camera recordings at these tournaments, so players would be more easily corruptible, and the match-fixing organisers could generate a lot of money.’

In April, a report from the Tennis Integrity Review Panel (TIRP) highlighted that a 2012 deal under which Sportradar agreed to commercialise the International Tennis Federation’s (ITF) ‘live’ match data posed a threat to the integrity of the game at the Challenger and Futures levels. ‘In 2013, the year after the first ITF-Sportradar contract, 40,000 matches at ITF Men’s Futures and Women’s $15k and $25k events were made available to the betting market’, reads the TIRP Report. ‘By 2016, that number had increased to over 60,000 matches. The number of alerts received by the TIU has also greatly increased over this period, from 15 alerts being received in 2013, to 240 and 185 alerts being received in 2016 and 2017, respectively. In the Panel’s assessment there is a strong causal connection between the sale of official live scoring data to the lowest levels and the growth in betting on matches at those levels.’

The TIRP Report recommended that to reduce the integrity threat to tennis, the sale of live scoring data on the ITF’s US$15k and $25k Professional Circuit events should be halted. Sportradar argues that if it didn’t collect such data from the lower levels of sport, somebody else would, creating a greater integrity threat. The ITF has yet to take a decision on the TIRP Report’s recommendations.