Betting

Josimar has found new evidence which shows that TGP, the Isle of Man company which provides UK gambling licences to Asian betting partners of a number of Premier League clubs, is intimately linked with the Suncity Group of Alvin Chau, the suspected triad member who was recently jailed for 18 years for fraud and gambling offences in China.

Asian betting brands are omnipresent in European football. In reality, most of them are owned by a handful of super-bookmakers, hiding their identities and huge cash flow.

A Football Association ruling on 262 alleged breaches of its betting rules by Brentford player Ivan Toney is imminent. Kynan Isaac, who in October last year was issued with the FA’s longest ban to date of eleven and a half years, argues that double standards are in play.

President of World Athletics and member of the International Olympic Committee, Sebastian Coe, is a director of a company which has significant control over Fifa’s first official betting partner Betano.

In 2018, according to documents seen by Josimar, the African Football Confederation (Caf) entered a ten year long sponsorship deal worth close to 60 million euro with controversial online bookmaker 1XBet. But Caf is now “re-evaluating” its business relationship with 1XBet, in a move that could cost millions for the cash-strapped confederation.

The sponsor of Barcelona and Paris Saint-Germain, 1XBet, was declared bankrupt this week. But the bookmaker is still signing new deals with several actors in international football.

Low level club friendlies remain at greater risk of match fixing but football’s international governing bodies are doing little or nothing to try and regulate what are essentially privately organised fixtures with no integrity safeguarding.

Mystery surrounds 8XBet, Manchester City’s new Asian betting partner. Open-source intelligence points to the UAE.

Bet365’s foray into the Chinese market may have expanded to include more than 12,000 domain names during the pandemic. IP addresses registered in Australia but located offshore, some possibly in Hong Kong, have been a key part of its operation.

You’d have thought that with the imminent publication of the British government’s White Paper on gambling and the current public interest in – and criticism of – that business, English football clubs would have taken a step back in their toxic relationship with bookmakers. At least for a while.