Six baseball players jailed in Taiwan match-fixing scandal
TAIPEI — Six former Taiwanese professional baseball players and a politician have been sentenced to jail terms of up to seven years following a match-fixing scandal that rocked the island's favourite…
TAIPEI — Six former Taiwanese professional baseball players and a politician have been sentenced to jail terms of up to seven years following a match-fixing scandal that rocked the island's favourite sport.Chang Chih-chia, an ex-pitcher for La New Bears (since renamed the Lamigo Monkeys), received a jail term of two years and two months for accepting money and paid-for sex services from bookies to fix games in 2008, the Banchiao district court said.Chang was one of the island's brightest sports stars when he joined Japan's Saitama Seibu Lions in 2002 for a record fee for a Taiwanese player.Wu Chien-pao, former head of Tainan county council, was handed a seven-year jail term for coercing players to cooperate with his gambling ring.Other sentences handed out ranged from three months to four years, the court said. The defendants have the right to appeal.Prosecutors in 2009 started investigating claims that some players received cash, luxury cars and sexual services from bookies to deliberately lose games and indicted 24 people for gambling and fraud offences last year.The case dealt a fresh blow to Taiwanese baseball, which has been hit by a string of similar scandals in recent years.In 2008, Taiwan's baseball league banned the Media T-Rex team over match-fixing allegations implicating the team's management and three players, among others. Copyright © 2011 AFP. All rights reserved. More »
last modification 2011-07-01 08:30:28
Add comment