The president of Italian third division football side Potenza was among nine people arrested in connection with an investigation into possible match-fixing and illegal betting, police said on Monday. Giuseppe Postiglione, who has not yet been charged, was taken into custody after police probed 10 matches and potential mafia links.

Italy was rocked by a match-fixing scandal in 2006 when Juventus were demoted while German prosecutors said last week that more than 200 people fixed or tried to fix around 200 games across Europe.

Task force set up in Germany

FRANKFURT: German football authorities have set up a task force to deal with the findings of the match-fixing investigation. German football federation (DFB) president Theo Zwanziger, speaking at a news conference Monday in Frankfurt, said football had to work closely with state prosecutors because they were dealing with organised crime. “On our own, we would be helpless,” Zwanziger said.

The task force includes officials from DFB and DFL, the German football league that runs the country’s top two divisions of 18 clubs each. Its job would be a “transparent handling off all suspicions,” Zwanziger said.

Bochum prosecutors leading the investigation into the match-fixing scandal have targeted about 200 people suspected of manipulating games. Zwanziger did not release names and said he regretted that names of some players and clubs from the minor leagues have been circulating in the German media.

On Monday, Bochum prosecutors again declined to divulge any names.

Among those arrested was Ante Sapina, who was convicted for organising the match-fixing in Germany at the heart of a scandal in 2005 involving referee Robert Hoyzer. After that scandal, the DFB put into place its own early-warning system to report suspicious betting patterns.

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