The alleged match-fixing ringmaster - Perumal's world wide web of corruption By Matt Barlow

The name of Wilson Raj Perumal will be depressingly familiar to those who have tried to disentangle football’s global match-fixing web.

When these scandals erupt, the Singaporean of Tamil descent, a trained engineer and petty criminal turned bookmaker and fixer, is never far away.

For a time he masterminded this international enterprise — thought to have generated hundreds of millions in fraudulent winnings for crime organisations in the Far East — from a one-bed flat in Wembley.

In the dock: Wilson Maj Perumal in the Lapland district court in Finland in June 2011. He was jailed for match-fixing

Then he was jailed for match-fixing in Finland in 2011.
He was sentenced to two years but served a year, before being handed over to authorities in Hungary who were also investigating football’s betting scams. Perumal believes police were tipped off by others inside his organisation and has since exposed some details to media outlets and presumably to police.

The Finnish scandal surrounded the club Rovaniemen Palloseura (RoPS) in the northern city of Rovaniemi. Perumal and nine RoPS players were convicted of match-fixing having taken bribes of up to £33,000 each.

Before the Finnish venture, Perumal is alleged to have fixed matches in Africa, the Middle East and Central America. He is reported to have been behind the scandal of the Zimbabwe national team playing games in Asia in 2007 and 2009, which culminated in 98 Zimbabwean footballers and two coaches being suspended last year. 

And he is ensnared in the huge Europol investigation revealed earlier this year, which involves club officials, referees and players and concerns 380 matches in 15 different countries between 2011 and 2013.

Another incident was the international played between Togo and Bahrain in September 2011, when Togo were beaten  3-0 though it later emerged that they were not the real Togo team.

Perumal arrived in London early in 2011, having skipped bail in Singapore, where he faced a charge of hitting a police officer with his car.
He lived among Wembley’s Sri Lankan community and went by the name of Rajamohan Chelliah until the Finnish police swooped in the Arctic and the web started to unravel