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Infamous football boss with an issued international arrest warrant is arrested

15 September 2011 / 21:09:24  GRReporter
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In July an international arrest warrant was issued for the infamous football boss and now Greek police seized Makis Psomiadis. He is accused of extortion, fraud, bribery and football matches. Greek police with an anti-terrorism team arrested him in a luxury villa in Sounio - about 30 kilometers away from Athens. 

A prosecutor has issued the arrest warrant in mid July. Detained in the same case are also the president of Olympiakos Volos - Achileas Beos and the owner of the football club in the Athens suburb Ilioupolis George Tsakoyanis. In early July after the outbreak of the scandal with fixed matches Makis Psomiadis promised to surrender himself into the hands of justice and thus managed to insure the release of his son, Stavros, who along with him was charged with organizing illegal gambling. But the president of the Kavala football club did not honor his word. 

In recent months there were rumors that he was hiding in the Holy Mountain, then in Skopje, or somewhere in Serbia. Police caught up with him in the aristocratic Athenian neighborhood Psychiko, then followed his movements around the Attica area, in Thessaloniki and finally arrested him today in Sounio, in a villa he had rented only a few days ago and was living there alone. Police found his location by tapping his telephone conversations. According to initial information Makis Psomiadis did not resist his arrest. "I have nothing to do with match fixing. I am a victim of machinations. I did not give myself up, because I expected the case to clear itself," he said during his arrest. 

For the crimes in which he was accused he has already been tried by the sports court and was sentenced to be removed from the stadium for life. Most of the settled matches, according to the International Football Federation UEFA, are from second group and were played in the period 2008-2011. The Federation gave four folders in which matches are divided into categories "slightly suspicious”, "doubtful", "very doubtful" and "corrupt." The UEFA system for detecting fraud has not found so many settled matches in any other country as in Greece. It is believed that the disclosure of the fraud was helped by the huge gambled sums. 

Tags: Makis Psomiadis match fixing bribery gambling
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