In September 2013, Dan Tan was arrested by police in Singapore as part of a major sweep against illegal soccer match-fixing. He was released two years later when a court decided that his detention was unlawful, but he didn’t stay free for long. After having tasted freedom for only about a week, he was put back in prison, charged with running one of the largest match-fixing syndicates in the world. Five years later, Tan is now a free man once again.
According to The Straits Times, the 55-year-old was released in December of last year, having been held for five years without ever standing trial for his alleged crimes. His story is one that would make for a good movie, even if it would potentially give would-be criminals too many ideas.
Tan was once described as the leader of the “most aggressive” match-fixing syndicate in the world. However, he wasn’t some kingpin locked away behind a heavily-gated mansion. Instead, he was a regular employee with a day job living in a condominium in Singapore’s Rivervale Crest community, a high school dropout with a knack for investments and gambling.
As with most criminal masterminds, he started small and his education came via the school of hard knocks. He ended up in prison in the 1990s for gambling-related crimes, including operating an illegal bookmaking business, and he honed his skills to better thwart law enforcement scrutiny.
Tan would go on to create a global ring that helped fix soccer matches in a number of countries, including Hungary, Italy, Finland, Nigeria and more. He wasn’t able to stay off law enforcement’s radar for long, though and he was put on wanted lists in both Hungary and Italy before the ring collapsed in 2013, taking Tan down with it.
A business partner of Tan, and fellow match-fixer, Wilson Raj Perumal, went down hard in Hungary before the ring was broken up. He was snared in 2011 and it was revealed that he and Tan had planned on purchasing Tampere United, a soccer club out of Finland. However, the goal wasn’t to actually back the team; it was to use the ownership as a way to manipulate the team’s play and the results of its games.
Raj accused Tan of ratting him out after the deal went south for reasons that aren’t clear. Tan counters that Raj turned him over to the police in order to save himself. Raj is now on house arrest in Hungary.
Tan is going to have to walk a straight line now that he’s back on the street. A Police Supervision Order (PSO), similar to parole in the US, is going to force him to wear an electronic tag, report to law enforcement once a week, adhere to a daily curfew and stay away from others under PSOs.
