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Two soccer players and a betting agent are convicted of match-fixing in Hong Kong

HONG KONG (AP) — A Hong Kong court on Friday convicted two soccer players and a betting agent with bribing other players to rig matches in the city’s top two football leagues in an operation that involved tens of thousands of dollars.

The two players, Brian Fok and Luciano Silva Da Silva, and the betting agent, Waheed Mohammad, ran a match-fixing gambling operation that covered some 30 matches from 2021 to 2023, the city’s Independent Commission Against Corruption, which led the investigation, said in a statement.

Fok first attempted to fix a match in October 2021. He offered $10,000 per match to a teammate in the Hong Kong Football Club team, which is a member of the HK Premier League, to participate in fixing the game. The teammate declined, but Fok later found willing participants in Silva Da Silva and Mohammad.

The three men then acted to fix match results, placing illegal bets on more than 30 matches in the HK First Division, another league in the city. Both Fok and Silva Da Silva were playing on teams in that league then. Their operation involved intentionally losing matches.

The three men are in custody and will be sentenced at a later date.

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AP soccer: https://apnews.com/hub/soccer

Beijing bans 4 New Zealand lawmakers from entering China because they visited Taiwan

WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) — Beijing banned four New Zealand lawmakers from traveling to China for a year and demanded they apologize because they visited Taiwan on a parliamentary trip, according to a message from the Chinese embassy conveyed via parliamentary officials and shown to The Associated Press on Thursday. China has hit lawmakers from other countries with sanctions related to contact with Taiwan before, but it's the first time for New Zealand parliamentarians, the government in Wellington said. Beijing has been increasing pressure in recent years on the democratically governed island that it claims as its own territory. Two lawmakers reached by the AP on Thursday rejected the demand for an apology, while the other two could not be immediately reached. New Zealand's government said it would express concern about the travel bans to Beijing. The elected officials visited Taipei in May, as New Zealand parliamentarians have done “for decades,” a spokesperson for Foreign Minister Winston Peters said in a statement.
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