Operation Conifer: a dozen arrested for fixing modest football matches for bets

Agents of the National Police, Europol and Interpol, during Operation Conifer, in an image provided by Interior.

The National Police has launched this Tuesday a broad operation against corruption in sports in which ten people have been arrested for fixing modest football matches, according to

and police sources have confirmed to EL PAÍS.

Among those arrested are several active players who allegedly "took advantage of their condition to organize sports fixes in teams under their influence," according to the Police in a press release.

The fixes mainly affect matches in the First and Second categories of the Royal Spanish Football Federation (RFEF), former Second B and Third, but also in the Gibraltar National League.

The operation, which is instructed secretly in a court in San Luca de Barrameda (Cádiz), epicenter of the network, is carried out by agents of the National Police Center for Integrity in Sports and Gambling (Cenpida) of the National Police, which He also headed, in May 2019, the Operation Oikos for match-fixing in the First, Second and Third Divisions, and is still under judicial investigation.

The investigations began in May 2021 after detecting the General Directorate for the Regulation of Gambling (DGOJ), dependent on the Ministry of Consumption, suspicious betting movements around a Third Division match.

This body, which is responsible for "ensuring the integrity, security, reliability and transparency of gaming operations", has had, since 2017, the so-called Global Betting Market Research Service (Sigma), in charge of collaborating with Security Forces in the prevention and detection of match-fixing.

The subsequent investigations allowed to determine the existence of a network organized in several levels in which active players participated.

The ten arrests have occurred in the provinces of Badajoz, Seville, Almería and Cádiz, although sources consulted indicate that the arrests may finally be twenty.

All of them are accused of the crimes of belonging to a criminal organization, corruption between individuals in the sports field and fraud against game operators.

Both the EU police agency, Europol, and Interpol collaborate in the investigations.

The latter periodically acts against the fixing of sports bets through Soga Operations, which in its last phase, carried out last September in 28 countries, resulted in 1,400 detainees, 800 of them in Hong Kong.

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