Ndumiso Gumede, the chairman of the Zifa probe team said they would not be both “judge and jury”. Gumede made the comments ahead of the second round of interviews which started in Harare yesterday. Fifa general secretary, Jerome Valcke said early this month that the Zimbabwean players caught up in the match-fixing scam should not be allowed to play football.
“I was there in Khartoum when Valcke made those comments at a press conference but we are saying the probe team cannot be both judge and jury. We will let those implicated appear before another committee to exonerate themselves.
“After that the report will be tabled to the Sports and Recreation Commission and Zifa president (Cuthbert Dube). My boss will make the recommendations on whether to prosecute depending on the evidence at hand,” Gumede said.
Several players confessed in sworn statements to an official investigation that they were paid to lose matches in 2008 and 2009.
All the players are, however, still playing for their respective clubs in South Africa and in Zimbabwe.“If someone has confessed then this person should not be playing anymore,” Valcke told BBC Sport in early March.
The internationals had admitted that they were paid to lose matches against Thailand, Malaysia and Syria.
The only notable casualties of the scam is Henrietta Rushwaya, former Zifa chief executive who was sacked in December 2009 when the scandal came to light and the programme manager Jonathan Musavengana, who was also fired.
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Asked to comment on whether the probe team had any tangible and incriminating evidence to nail the alleged culprits, Gumede said his committee’s task was to get information.
“My duty is to gather information from the players and coaches who went to Asia. We want information that confirms thay money exchanged hands to throw away matches. Evidence is neither here nor there. We want to find out whether there were things which were not done above board,” Gumede said.
Zifa keep tabs on Perumal’s arrest
Zifa are also following with keen interest the arrest of the match-fixing mastermind Wilson Raj Perumal in Finland. The Singapore businessman is fingered as the principal figure in the match-fixing scandal that rocked the Zimbabwe Warriors.
Investigators are working with Interpol and the Finnish police to establish if there are any connections with the match-fixing that rocked the friendly internationals in Turkey and Antalya. Fifa is examining two matches played in Antalya in February, and has opened an investigation into the possibility that the games were fixed.
The two games, between Latvia and Bolivia and Estonia and Bulgaria, were played back-to-back in the Mardan Stadium in Antalya, and all seven goals in the two matches were penalties. Investigators are looking into the total number of goals that may have been manipulated for betting purposes.
There is no suggestion that the teams were complicit in the alleged fixing, but the six match officials involved, three from Bosnia and three from Hungary, are now the subject of a Fifa disciplinary investigation, according to a statement from Fifa.
Fifa and the European criminal authorities are now examining whether there are links between a game involving a “fake” Togo team in Bahrain and the two Antalya matches.
The matches were arranged by two separate agents based in the Far East, who apparently approached the national associations and offered payments of at least US$42 264 to take part.There is a possibility that rather than targeting existing fixtures, fixers were arranging internationals themselves, recruiting unwitting national teams in order to profit from gambling.
The Togo-Bahrain game was organised by Perumal, a Singapore businessman who has been implicated in match-fixing allegations involving Zimbabwe.
Perumal was arrested in Finland last month on suspicion of paying bribes to players to try and manipulate matches in the Finnish leagues. He is currently being held in custody.
