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The threat of organised crime and the emergence of new offshore wagering havens in tiny jurisdictions such as Vanuatu will be a focus of Australia’s largest gathering of sports integrity professionals this week, as the nation prepares to host at least one major international sporting event each year in the run up to the 2032 Brisbane Games.
Sport Integrity Australia (SIA) will bring together the codes, law enforcement agencies and wagering companies with the goal of establishing a major events taskforce on Wednesday, following a separate Victoria Police summit on Tuesday featuring 200-plus integrity experts.
Although there has been cooperation for previous events such as the 2015 men’s Asian Cup and 2023 Women’s World Cup, the new arrangements reflect SIA’s new co-ordination role under sports integrity treaty the Macolin Convention, amid heightened awareness of the cross-border character of illegal wagering.
James Moller, head of strategy and international policy at SIA, said it is “well understood” what to do when an alert arrives from local wagering partners around suspicious betting within domestic sport, but interstate and international collaboration can be less straightforward.
“You could have athletes arriving in Western Australia, in New South Wales, in Queensland, you could have gambling happening in a different state or territory, and the sports betting environment is truly global,” Moller said.
“It really is about making sure that you’re across the right pieces of intelligence that are coming in and getting them to the right stakeholders in a timely fashion, especially because the timeframes are so short with these major events.”
The A-League Men has been the target of two recent match-fixing plots involving players from Macarthur and Western United, and local football has become an international target.
The Asian Cup will bring 11 teams to Australia from across Asia, made up mostly of semi-professional female players who present different integrity challenges to local officials.
“There are differences in women’s sport in terms of player salaries, potentially levels of integrity education that players receive, athletes arriving from a variety of countries that we might not see in a different sport so, for example, it might be a different conversation if it was a taskforce meeting before a Rugby League World Cup or a Cricket World Cup,” Moller said. “The idea would be to tailor the conversation to each tournament.”
The meetings come days after The Play The Game sports transparency conference in Finland, attended by multiple Australian speakers, heard explosive details about the increasing mobility of offshore gambling providers.
Crackdowns in traditional international betting jurisdictions such as Curacao, the Isle of Man and the Philippines have driven illegal providers towards emerging authorities.
Growing players include Anjouan in the Indian Ocean, Saint Kitts and Nevis in the Caribbean, Canadian First Nation regulatory bodies in Tobique and Kahnawake, and Vanuatu, which launched its gaming authority last year offering licenses from €5,000 ($AU8,900), payable by bitcoin.
“What really worries me as much as anything is that this landscape that I’m talking about, which has changed beyond all recognition, we have no way of controlling it,” investigative journalist Phillipe Auclair told the conference, revealing how these jurisdictions have issued hundreds of licences in recent years.
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“Every time we knock one of those on the head, like you’ve done in the Isle of Man, there’s another place which appears and in which these people find a shelter and a way to carry on their business.”
Lindsey Kennedy, research director at The Eyewitness Project, said companies in the offshore wagering market were connected to organised crime and human trafficking in countries like Cambodia.
“Last year, the Philippines announced a ban on all offshore gambling companies,” she said. “Instead of shutting down though, many just migrated to Cambodia.”
Sport Integrity Australia’s Karina Chilman, assistant director for major sporting events and international engagement, and Linda Muir, head of sport engagement, also presented at the conference.
The Women’s Asian Cup next year is the first in a series of major international tournaments due to arrive on Australian shores, including the men’s and women’s Rugby World Cups, men’s and women’s Rugby League World Cups, the 2028 T20 World Cup, and the 2032 Olympic Games. Some, like the rugby league and cricket events, involve working with international co-hosts.
The symposium on Tuesday includes a keynote address from former New Zealand cricketer Lou Vincent, who was banned in 2014 for match-fixing. Victoria Police assistant commissioner Cindy Millen said Australian competitions remain a focus of both domestic and international match-fixing syndicates.
“Investigations into this type of criminality require law enforcement agencies both across the country and internationally to respond with a coordinated approach, incorporating all our partners,” she said, adding the focus remains on “mitigating the risk of infiltration by organised crime”.
