BBC
14 December 2010
Zimbabwe’s Minister of Sport, David Coltart, has called for a police investigation into claims of match-fixing made against the national team.
Zimbabwe players and officials have admitted being paid to throw matches on a trip to Thailand and Malaysia.
They made the admissions in sworn testimony to an enquiry held by the Zimbabwe Football Association (Zifa).
The allegations of match-fixing centred on a tour where Zimbabwe lost 3-0 to Thailand and 6-0 to Syria.
Minister Coltart told the AP news agency that Zifa “must initiate [a] police investigation right now” because of what he called “very serious allegations”.
But the Zifa President Cuthbert Dube said that no action had yet been taken because the investigation had widened to take in a previous trip to Asia in 2007.
The Chief Executive of Zifa, Henrietta Rushwaya, was fired in October, having been accused of failing to account for a loan made to Zifa of US$103 000 and authorising a 2008 trip to Malaysia where elite club Monomotapa masqueraded as the Zimbabwe national team.
She is hoping to be exonerated through the government’s labour court where her case has yet to be concluded.
The BBC’s Steve Vickers in Harare says that the sports minister’s call for the police to take action is not a surprise given the extent of the findings of the Zifa inquiry into match-fixing, and that Zifa itself has still not handed out bans to the players who are implicated.