Cosafa's 14 member countries set to fight match-fixing
Sowetan Live reports that the 14 member countries of the Council of Southern African Football Associations (Cosafa) completed on Saturday a "positive" two-day workshop, aimed at fighting match-fixing and corruption in soccer in the region.
The workshop was part of a worldwide Fifa-Interpol initiative to eradicate criminal activity in sport and was attended by the game's administrators, players' representatives, betting regulators and law-enforcement units.
"The [workshop] got people together to tackle the problem jointly," said Safa president Kirsten Nematandani, who delivered the keynote address. He added that good progress was made and that "matters are moving in the right direction." One of the major obstacles to overcome, he said, was the fraudulent betting syndicates who "made it their business to organise match-fixing". Often the syndicates had their bases thousands of kilometres away from the games, with Asia in particular prevalent in this respect.
According to Sowetan Live, Nematandani warned that it would be wrong to "cast a blind eye to the problem and pretend it does not exist."
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