This Thursday, the Council of Ministers approved the criminalization of sports coercion as part of the legal regime for the integrity of sports, and also announced the creation of a platform to coordinate the fight against match-fixing.
According to the decision of the Council of Ministers, the Government realized that the turnover of sports betting on the territory base and online quota, which amounted to about 2,000,000,000 euros in each of the last two years, poses a growing threat to the integrity of the competition. .
Thus, the executive branch, led by António Costa, fully integrated the previous legislation into this new legislation, namely that which condemned conduct that could affect the truth, loyalty and correctness of competitions and their results, and partly the disciplinary regime of sports federations.
This change was made by a working group, the preliminary version of which was evaluated by the Portuguese football, basketball and tennis federations – the federations with the largest betting volume – as well as the National Sports Council (CND), the Supreme Court. the judiciary, the Supreme Council of the State Ministry and the Bar Association.
In order to ensure the integrity of sport, the government intends to “fight against unsportsmanlike conduct that is contrary to the values of truth, loyalty and correctness and that allows for the fraudulent change of competition results.”
To this end, he created the crime of sports coercion, a platform for monitoring the manipulation of competitions and the National Council for Integrity in Sports (CNaID), headed by the President of the Portuguese Institute of Sports and Youth (IPDJ), currently Victor Pataco, which will include representatives of the security forces (GNR and PSP), judicial and tax authorities (PJ, PGR and AT), as well as federations and class associations.
The platform, which will be coordinated by the Director of the Anti-Corruption Department of the Judicial Police (PO), will have experts appointed by various bodies such as the General Prosecutor’s Office, the PO itself, the Portuguese Olympic Committee (PC), the Portuguese Football Federation (FPF) and others.
Among its functions, this platform will be responsible for “coordinating the fight against the manipulation of sports competitions”, as well as “developing, approving, implementing and submitting a national sports integrity program to CNaID.”
Author: Portuguese
Source: CM Jornal
I’m Dave Martin, and I’m an experienced journalist working in the news industry. As a part of my work, I write for 24 News Reporters, covering mostly sports-related topics. With more than 5 years of experience as a journalist, I have written numerous articles on various topics to provide accurate information to readers.