A cross-party agreement in the Danish parliament has strengthened the match-fixing capabilities of the Danish Gambling Authority (DGA), the Spillemyndigheden.
Of significance, the agreement has bolstered the DGA’s supervisory role of the gambling industry in the country, with all betting operators in Denmark now required to report signs of suspicions of match-fixing to the authority.
This will see the secretariat for the platform for combating match-fixing moved from the Anti Doping Denmark organisation to the DGA, as part of the Danish government’s wider campaign against sports manipulation with relation to betting.
Additional elements of this strategy have included the introduction of a mandatory Player ID in November of last year, which authorities hope to use to ‘reveal gaming patterns’ through the collection and analysis of gaming data in order to detect signs of money laundering or match fixing.
“Match-fixing is a serious problem because it threatens to destroy the integrity of the sport,” stated Minister for Taxation Jeppe Bruus. “We have seen extensive examples of this around Europe – in some cases with criminal organisations.
“The gambling operators are already making an effort today, but now we are tightening the requirements for them further, so that they become even more active participants in the fight against match-fixing.”
According to the International Betting Integrity Associations (IBIA) latest report into match manipulation, Europe continues to account for the single largest number of integrity alerts at 188 – representing 50% of all global cases in 2021.
From a sporting perspective, football and tennis remain the most widely affected sports by corruption related issues. Betting alerts for both sports stood at 66 and 80 respectively, with the number of football cases increasing from 61 by 8% to 66, – the highest number the IBIA has recorded for the sport.
However, in the case of tennis, the 80 alerts actually represented an 18% decline on the 98 reported in 2020. This is a welcomed ‘downward trend’ for this sport, with 98 reported in 2020, 101 in 2019 and 178 in 2018.
