ISTANBUL // Hundreds of football fans gathered outside a court yesterday as the trial against more than 90 officials, managers and players suspected of involvement in Turkey's largest match-fixing scandal started under heavy security.
Dressed in the yellow-and-blue jerseys of Turkey's champions Fenerbahce SK, fans outside a judicial complex in Siliviri shouted slogans and unfolded banners in support of Aziz Yildirim, the Fenerbahce president, one of the 93 suspects on trial.
"We are right, we will win," read a banner held up by fans of the Istanbul club. A poster with the picture of Mr Yildirim carried the slogan: "We know, We are at your side."
Mr Yildirim, 59, a millionaire businessman, is accused of paying bribes officials and players of opponents, and incentives to teams playing against rivals during Fenerbahce's 2010/2011 title-winning season. Mr Yildirim denies the accusation. He is among 23 suspects being held in custody.
In a statement to reporters in the courtroom, Mr Yildirim denied that he had given €100,000 (Dh483,000) to Ibrahim Akin, a former player of rival Istanbul club, Istanbul BB. "Where are the documents?" Mr Yildirim said, according to Turkish news reports. "If they prove this, I will throw myself from the nearest bridge. It is a shame, a shame"
The match-fixing scandal has rocked this football-crazy country. It has led to the elimination of Fenerbahce from the Uefa Champions League and to the resignation of the leadership of Turkey's football federation. Another leading club embroiled in the scandal, Besiktas, was forced to hand back the Turkish Cup that it won last year. Half a dozen Fenerbahce officials as well as a former vice-president and a former manager of Besiktas are among the accused.
There have been suspicions about possible match-fixing in Turkey's football for years, but this is the first time that a top team has been the target of a criminal investigation. Fenerbahce is Turkey's most successful club with 18 Super Lig titles. It once counted Turkey's founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, among its fans.
Many Fenerbahce fans say their club had been singled out as a scapegoat. In a move widely seen as an effort to curry favour with football fans, Turkey's biggest political parties teamed up last year to reduce sentences for match-fixing.
Mehmet Ekinci, the presiding judge, tried to calm supporters of the clubs accused of involvement in the scandal. "We are not trying clubs here. We are trying defendants accused of a crime," Mr Ekinci told reporters on Saturday.
The trial is being held in a high-security compound in Silivri, 50 kilometres west of Istanbul, that is also used for trials against suspected coup plotters and serves as a detention centre for Turkey's former military chief and other high-profile suspects. No cameras were allowed in the courtroom, but Turkish news reports said Mr Yildirim appeared to be in good spirits.
Olgun Peker, the former chairman of the club Giresunspor from Turkey's Black Sea coast who has been linked in the media to organised crime in the past, is another key suspect. Officials, managers and players from six other clubs are also charged with fixing matches.
Prosecutors say the accused manipulated several matches last season. One of the games investigated was Fenerbahce's 4-3 victory over Sivasspor on May 22, which secured the championship for Mr Yildirim's club.
In their 401-page indictment prosecutors ask for up to 147 years in prison for Mr Yildirim.
Records of wire-tapped telephone conversations form the core of the prosecution's case. According to the indictment quoted in news reports, suspects talked about the manipulations in code, using the phrase "drinking coffee" for fixing a match and calling football players "construction workers".
tseibert@thenational.ae
Learn more about Qasr Al Hosn
In 2013, The National's History Project went beyond the walls to see what life was like living in Abu Dhabi's fabled fort:
Herc's Adventures
Developer: Big Ape Productions
Publisher: LucasArts
Console: PlayStation 1 & 5, Sega Saturn
Rating: 4/5
Iran's dirty tricks to dodge sanctions
There’s increased scrutiny on the tricks being used to keep commodities flowing to and from blacklisted countries. Here’s a description of how some work.
1 Going Dark
A common method to transport Iranian oil with stealth is to turn off the Automatic Identification System, an electronic device that pinpoints a ship’s location. Known as going dark, a vessel flicks the switch before berthing and typically reappears days later, masking the location of its load or discharge port.
2. Ship-to-Ship Transfers
A first vessel will take its clandestine cargo away from the country in question before transferring it to a waiting ship, all of this happening out of sight. The vessels will then sail in different directions. For about a third of Iranian exports, more than one tanker typically handles a load before it’s delivered to its final destination, analysts say.
3. Fake Destinations
Signaling the wrong destination to load or unload is another technique. Ships that intend to take cargo from Iran may indicate their loading ports in sanction-free places like Iraq. Ships can keep changing their destinations and end up not berthing at any of them.
4. Rebranded Barrels
Iranian barrels can also be rebranded as oil from a nation free from sanctions such as Iraq. The countries share fields along their border and the crude has similar characteristics. Oil from these deposits can be trucked out to another port and documents forged to hide Iran as the origin.
* Bloomberg
65
Directors: Scott Beck, Bryan Woods
Stars: Adam Driver, Ariana Greenblatt, Chloe Coleman
Rating: 2/5
TWISTERS
Director: Lee Isaac Chung
Starring: Glenn Powell, Daisy Edgar-Jones, Anthony Ramos
Rating: 2.5/5
COMPANY PROFILE
Company name: Revibe
Started: 2022
Founders: Hamza Iraqui and Abdessamad Ben Zakour
Based: UAE
Industry: Refurbished electronics
Funds raised so far: $10m
Investors: Flat6Labs, Resonance and various others
The specs
Engine: 3.6-litre, V6
Transmission: eight-speed auto
Power: 285hp
Torque: 353Nm
Price: Dh159,900
On sale: now
States of Passion by Nihad Sirees,
Pushkin Press
KEY DATES IN AMAZON'S HISTORY
July 5, 1994: Jeff Bezos founds Cadabra Inc, which would later be renamed to Amazon.com, because his lawyer misheard the name as 'cadaver'. In its earliest days, the bookstore operated out of a rented garage in Bellevue, Washington
July 16, 1995: Amazon formally opens as an online bookseller. Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought becomes the first item sold on Amazon
1997: Amazon goes public at $18 a share, which has grown about 1,000 per cent at present. Its highest closing price was $197.85 on June 27, 2024
1998: Amazon acquires IMDb, its first major acquisition. It also starts selling CDs and DVDs
2000: Amazon Marketplace opens, allowing people to sell items on the website
2002: Amazon forms what would become Amazon Web Services, opening the Amazon.com platform to all developers. The cloud unit would follow in 2006
2003: Amazon turns in an annual profit of $75 million, the first time it ended a year in the black
2005: Amazon Prime is introduced, its first-ever subscription service that offered US customers free two-day shipping for $79 a year
2006: Amazon Unbox is unveiled, the company's video service that would later morph into Amazon Instant Video and, ultimately, Amazon Video
2007: Amazon's first hardware product, the Kindle e-reader, is introduced; the Fire TV and Fire Phone would come in 2014. Grocery service Amazon Fresh is also started
2009: Amazon introduces Amazon Basics, its in-house label for a variety of products
2010: The foundations for Amazon Studios were laid. Its first original streaming content debuted in 2013
2011: The Amazon Appstore for Google's Android is launched. It is still unavailable on Apple's iOS
2014: The Amazon Echo is launched, a speaker that acts as a personal digital assistant powered by Alexa
2017: Amazon acquires Whole Foods for $13.7 billion, its biggest acquisition
2018: Amazon's market cap briefly crosses the $1 trillion mark, making it, at the time, only the third company to achieve that milestone
Company Profile
Company name: Cargoz
Date started: January 2022
Founders: Premlal Pullisserry and Lijo Antony
Based: Dubai
Number of staff: 30
Investment stage: Seed
Killing of Qassem Suleimani
Killing of Qassem Suleimani
FIXTURES
Thu Mar 15 – West Indies v Afghanistan, UAE v Scotland
Fri Mar 16 – Ireland v Zimbabwe
Sun Mar 18 – Ireland v Scotland
Mon Mar 19 – West Indies v Zimbabwe
Tue Mar 20 – UAE v Afghanistan
Wed Mar 21 – West Indies v Scotland
Thu Mar 22 – UAE v Zimbabwe
Fri Mar 23 – Ireland v Afghanistan
The top two teams qualify for the World Cup
Classification matches
The top-placed side out of Papua New Guinea, Hong Kong or Nepal will be granted one-day international status. UAE and Scotland have already won ODI status, having qualified for the Super Six.
Thu Mar 15 – Netherlands v Hong Kong, PNG v Nepal
Sat Mar 17 – 7th-8th place playoff, 9th-10th place playoff
The biog
Date of birth: 27 May, 1995
Place of birth: Dubai, UAE
Status: Single
School: Al Ittihad private school in Al Mamzar
University: University of Sharjah
Degree: Renewable and Sustainable Energy
Hobby: I enjoy travelling a lot, not just for fun, but I like to cross things off my bucket list and the map and do something there like a 'green project'.
