Scamdal 3
How we are played, in five easy lessons.
3. CHAIRMAN MAO
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The Athlone Town Athletic FC match-fixing scandal kicked off in May 2017. While it is the smallest of these five scandals on a national level, it is the one which is broadest in international scope.
It was all kind of simple. The club was caught fixing matches and the FAI was caught facilitating the operation. Step up, Irish law enforcement authorities ... sorry, what?
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The game kicked off when UEFA stated that there was ''clear and overwhelming'' evidence that one match in particular, a 3-1 loss by Athletic to Longford Town FC, was fixed. The FAI investigation, such as it was, expanded the inquiry to three matches and then dramatically contracted it to just a couple of incidents in the same one match.
The investing company was Pre Season, a company registered at the home of its only listed employee, Portugal's Jose Manuel Francisco. It was controlled and funded by the Singapore-based Chinese 'businessman' most commonly known as Eric Mao. Three of the Athletic players (Hernandez, Labuts and Viegas) had previously played at Atletico Clube de Portugal, a club whose Cayman Islands-registered management company was 70% owned by Mao (through Anping Sports Agency) and a club that was found to be fixing matches. Two other Athletic players (Grigorovs and Sfrijan) played at other clubs where matches were fixed. None of the five had ever been prosecuted.
After an out of season sojourn pretending to be referees in Cyprus, Grigorovs would move to Mao's FK Mohelnice in the Czech Republic, where matches were predictably fixed, and Viegas would become player/president of Mao's newly formed (and now defunct) club Racing Rioja CF in Spain. At Rioja, a strange mix of relative success (it presumably needed to get beyond its regional league to become a viable betting vehicle) and shambolic organisation were the order of the day.
Transparency International regards the Portuguese judiciary as notably corrupt, which is probably why Portugal was chosen as the location for Mao's first venture into Western Europe. That said, there have been significant investigations into corruption in Portugal, with lots of bigshots including judges and former Prime Ministers coming under serious criminal inquiry. This would be unthinkable for their peers in Ireland. And our laissez-faire attitude to what we call 'white collar crime' is surely why Ireland was chosen for Mao's second venture into Western Europe.
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The Atletico operation was falling apart when Pre Season's Marc Fourmeaux approached Cobh Ramblers and Bohemians in 2016. Cobh wasn't interested and Bohs could not be sold even if it was interested, as it is a private members' club. The same qualification prevented Athlone Town Association FC from being sold, but some of its executive committee were interested enough to form a new club called Athlone Town Athletic FC which could be sold. Pre Season bought 70% of Athletic for ''about US$500,000'' (according to the Asia Times) or E500,000 (according to Gazeta Sporturilor). The money almost certainly went into a company called Athlone Town AFC CLG, which had been incorporated in July 2015 by club employee Michael O'Connor, club Chairman John Hayden and club Secretary Garda David Dully in anticipation of its being given ownership of Athlone Town Stadium. The company had no connection with Athlone Town Association FC at the time, but has - following a 26-0 vote of purported members at a secretive AGM (where non-member Fourmeaux spoke but a fully paid up member was refused entry, never mind speaking rights) in late June 2017 - claimed the right to act as its management company. As Athletic, not Association, was the club which was actually playing in the League of Ireland at the time, it is peculiar that the everyday funding of Athletic's activities went through Association's bank account prior to that AGM. Up to that point, Athlone Town AFC CLG's account was effectively an escrow account for the holding of the E500k. All of this unusual activity would have to have been okayed by the FAI, which had full control over the club licencing process.
The FAI had information from UEFA that match fixing was likely to happen in Athlone before the 2017 season started. Its Director of Competitions Fran Gavin nonetheless declared the investment a positive sign of the increasing international allure of the League of Ireland. As early as March, the match-fixing was exposed by fans on social media. The FAI's response to this was to send Gavin to Athlone, where he held an 'integrity workshop' for the education of players and coaches.
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Three things invariably happen when well connected Irish people are caught with their pants down: 1. The Gardai are warned off. 2.The public gets to enjoy a scandal, with lots of media disbelief and outrage, and a little comedy. 3. Participants who secretively collaborated on the project with each other take to fighting with each other in a conspicuous way.
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The scandal route was taken when the interest of foreign media meant covering up the shenanigans was not a viable option. This led to quite a bit of panic for a time, even a burglary which apparently targeted files in the same way as 2022's burglary apparently targeted financial records. On the 'trust' terms claimed to apply to my company by Garda Dully and John Hayden, we would have been provided with the Pre Season contracts as a matter of course. We weren't, and the FAI has refused to release them to us. They have also been withheld from the High Court.
The FAI sent two investigators to Athlone - the ubiquitous Mr. Gavin and the solicitor Rea Walshe, whose only known dealings with the Athlone Towns at the time came in 2015, when she was asked by a concerned FAI employee to review a club document in which my company was impersonated. Bracey Daniels and Eddie Murray, two ex-Gardai who held senior roles in the FAI at the time, were strangely not chosen for the job, though they may have refused the commission. That the FAI brought its investigation to Athlone and didn't go beyond it was a sign that it viewed the issue more as something to be contained. This was understandable, given its central role in creating the scandal.
Gavin claimed that he had met with the investors prior to their getting the go ahead. This is possible, but my information is that he met only with Michael O'Connor, while Marc Fourmeaux and another unidentified representative of the investors did meet with a higher up figure in the FAI. Soon after the scandal broke, Fourmeaux stated that ''we have nothing to fear'' from a FAI investigation.
None of the referees or opposition goalkeepers in the fixed matches were interviewed or have ever been interviewed by the FAI (or by the GNECB/Fraud Squad), as is customary in match fixing investigations. In light of the fact that US $600k was won on another goal being scored in one Athlone match despite there being only a few minutes remaining, the former omission is very strange.
The players and Portuguese coaches were interviewed by the FAI in the Radisson Hotel, where they were asked to give up their phones and bank records. Subsequent to the investigation, all of them were asked to sign confidentiality agreements (beautifully spun by the club as ''confidentiality agreements which each and every member of the club was obliged to commit to under the threat of charge for non-cooperation'') and, it seems, none of them refused to do this. The whole procedure must have been humiliating for the honest players in the team and was presumably designed that way.
There have been some digital slip-ups along the way, but Mao runs a professional operation. Even in the unlikely event of a match fixing text or email being used in Athlone, it would surely have been deleted by the time Fran and Rea came to town. Would the investigators have had the skills required to retrieve a deleted text? Had they a working understanding of Portuguese, Romanian and Lettish (they were not accompanied by interpreters)? Could they unlock the phones, did they even try? As for the bank records, the whole point of moving to other countries and having foreign players controlling the fix on the field is, firstly, that locals who are more likely to talk are kept out of the loop and, secondly, that the players (or their families) can receive their payments in their native countries.
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The FAI's December 2015 streaming deal with Trackchamp made Irish match fixing a workable option for any interested parties. As said by Richard Sadlier, ''The deal was structured in such a way, that to view the live footage, subscribers needed to have an active gambling account''. Beyond that point, it was simply a matter for the investors of finding a club willing to sell itself, getting that club (in Athletic's case) into the league as quietly as possible, and working football administrators into compliance by whatever means.
The FAI did up a report, which remains confidential, and pronounced Labuts and Sfrijan guilty of match fixing. They got (hardly severe) twelve month bans. Then things got stranger.
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The Professional Footballers' Association of Ireland likes to present itself as being a thorn in the side of the FAI, even though it has an office at FAI HQ in Abbotstown. It did little or nothing when Athlone Town Association FC was refusing to pay the expenses of its amateur players in 2016. It was only after the players refused to travel to one match - causing it to be cancelled - that they got anywhere. But the PFAI jumped at the chance to fight for Labuts and Sfrijan in 2017, citing their human rights among other things. In doing this, it joined forces with a club that was run by the same people who had mistreated those amateur players.
Both of the organisations were headed by barristers. In opposition to them was the FAI, which decided to arm itself with less evidence than was already in the public domain. Recognising in part the absurdity of this, it purported to want to exhibit new evidence against the players (to what end?) and matters unsurprisingly went High Courty when Labuts and Sfrijan sought injunctions against this evidence. [It should be remembered that the reported ongoing bitter feud between the FAI and Athletic did not prevent the latter being granted a playing licence in 2018 despite the grounds not being insured, nor the former supplying two documents in November 2018 to aid its management company in a High Court case, nor the FAI CEO John Delaney - in the company of Director of Competitions Fran Gavin - opening an astro turf pitch for the management company in February 2019]
The players, with limited English and having lived in student accommodation in Athlone, somehow managed to have no less than two senior counsel in their corner - the Chairman of the Irish Bar Paul McGarry SC and the President of the Law Society Stuart Gilhooly SC. Fran Gavin, an ex-General Secretary of the PFAI who had played football with Gilhooly at Malahide United, was the FAI's sole deponent. Nothing of any substance happened in the case and it was announced as settled on 11 April 2018.
Labuts and Sfrijan were more likely to have been knocking back Black Russians in Transylvania than knocking around the Irish High Court on 11 April. I didn't see them there anyway, though I did see the Athletic Chairman John Hayden with Michael O'Connor and David Dully. Both Gavin and ex-FAI CEO Jonathan Hill have refused to say if the settlement involved payments from the FAI (effectively, given subsequent events, from the taxpayer) to Labuts and Sfrijan.
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McGarry and Gilhooly went further and took their concern for Labuts to the Court of Arbitration for Sport in Switzerland (the CAS was an organisation to which Gilhooly had coincidentally been appointed in 2015). Their argument, which basically boiled down to the impossibility of proving guilt based solely on a subjective interpretation of a player's movements, won.
But the argument was essentially a lawyer's trick, the narrowing of parameters to separate an action from the context in which the action occurred. It could just as successfully be argued that no jockey ever pulled a racehorse, no lawyer ever threw a court case and no boxer ever took a dive, because these are just random actions plausibly attributable to human error or incompetence. But when the actions are put back in the context of massive distributions of cash to people known to the actors, then it is entirely proper in most cases to consider the actors guilty of criminal conspiracy.
Besides all of that, the CAS still said that match-fixing took place in Athlone, so the decision changed nothing as far as the law was concerned. The public was led to believe that the crimes had somehow been dealt with. The Gardai were trying to convince themselves of the same thing and the media shut the story down. Why?
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Let's talk money. According to the Canadian match-fixing expert Declan Hill, Russian mob money were laundered through Mao's Atletico operation in Portugal. The possibility that money laundering is the primary purpose of Mao's operations - that the match fixing may be a smokescreen as well as a nice little earner - needs to be considered, but it is something that seldom if ever gets a mention. The laundering of Russian money is a taboo subject here, as the Labour leader Alan Kelly quickly discovered after he raised the alarm about some of the IFSC's activities in the Dail on 22 February 2022.
Callaview Ltd. was formed on 15 December 2016. It had a share capital of one million euro. 100 of its shares were taken up, with Pre Season holding 50 and John Hayden the other 50. Its directors were Athlone accountant Joey Boland, Portugal's Jose Manuel Francisco and France's Marc Fourmeaux. It submitted no accounts in its almost two years and eleven months of existence. Dama Management Ltd. was formed on 22 March 2017. It had a share capital of one hundred thousand euro. Its directors were Marc Fourmeaux and Italy's Davide Poli, each of whom held 50 of the 100 shares that were taken up. It submitted no accounts in its almost eighteen months of existence.
The Westmeath Independent published an unusual article in April 2017. It featured an anonymous interviewer and an anonymous interviewee (a representative of 'the club', 'Athlone Town FC' and 'Athlone Town AFC' - the article is an excellent example of the now old trick of conflating the clubs but, when expedient, answering about one when the question relates to the other). It reminded me, fairly or not, of Woody Allen cross-examining himself in 'Bananas'.
The mystery club man said that Callaview was ''set up to aid the management of the club's first team's affairs''. Solocheck.ie describes its principle activity as ''Activities of Holding Companies''. Solocheck.ie describes Dama Management's principle activity as ''Other Business Support Service Activities N.E.C. (not elsewhere classified)''.
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A real problem exists with tackling match-fixing and other kinds of border-hopping crime (such as the 2016 GOAL scandal). It also appears that if the organisation is structured like a corporate pyramid and it is obvious where the buck stops, then no one will pay the price because no police officer wants to be the one that shakes a pyramid.
Atletico was investigated by Portuguese police and Interpol, but no one went to prison. It was a similar story at Mohelnice in the Czech Republic. Mao's friend Omar Scafuro was jailed for embezzling E520,000 from the Spanish company of which he was Director General in order to buy Portugal's Beira-Mar CF, but that was more an improvised personal crime than an approved organised crime. Unless the senior officials of football administrations who facilitated the takeover of clubs under their watch for the purposes of crime are brought to some kind of reckoning, then the match-fixing industry can only expand.
It is notable that the GNECB has never made an announcement that it has concluded or is abandoning its investigation in Athlone, a move which would require an accompanying explanation. The Gardai did dramatically raid Bray Wanderers in late 2017, before investigating five matches. Nothing came of it, and the affair is unlikely to have been anything more than a little amateur operation inspired by Mao's great leap forward in Athlone. As long as gambling is legal, things like this will happen. There was something more to 2022's Operation Brookweed, as it stemmed from UEFA information, though what it was is not yet clear. But it often seems as if an Garda Siochana is tightly controlled by the FAI - jumping to attention when called, locked up at home when its presence might prove inconvenient.
A simple fact remains: Athlone Town Athletic FC is the only Irish football club to hold contracts with a match-fixing syndicate.
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Paul Rowan, writing in the Times on 25 May 2017: ''The FAI has refused to comment on the identity of the Athlone investors , but said that there would be transparency about 'all the interactions' once the investigation was finished''... seven years on, we are still waiting.
Any notion that the FAI had at least learned enough from the experience not to take the chance again bit the dust in Spring of last year. Athletic's management company decided that, since the Pre Season project had gone so well, it would like to sell the club to another mysterious transnational organisation with lots of money to throw around. Unfortunately, though Pre Season had burned its bridges with the dissolution of Callaview in November 2019, it still owned 70% of the club. So, someone came up with a wild idea - 'Why not create ANOTHER club out of thin air and sell that one instead?' Thus spake the Lord and verily unto the world and into the League of Ireland came 'Athlone Town Associated FC'.
The first choice buyer Irish Sea FC pulled out when it didn't fancy coming up with E100k in cash as a token of goodwill. Another US based company, Valeo Futbol Club, stepped into the breach. The arrangement was presented to the public as a 'strategic partnership'. Valeo's directors were involved in the drugs industry (through Outlier BioPharma) but it all seemed legal. And it wasn't fixing matches, there is that. This is what passes for footballing normality in the town of Athlone.
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