Up to 8 years in prison for match fixing. It is the proposal of a draft law, through which the parliamentarians want to make the tops of the Romanian sports forgotten. The law would practically entail the introduction of a new offense in the Penal Code.
At the moment, match fixing does not appear anywhere in the Criminal Code. When prosecutors discover such facts, they are framed as fraud or corruption.
The parliamentarians’ proposal is to introduce a new crime in the Penal Code that will be called “manipulation of sports events”, and the punishment will be between 2 and 8 years in prison.
According to the initiators, the change will help prosecutors to frame the act more easily when they discover such a crime.
Romania had to make changes regarding the legislation for the manipulation of sports events as early as 2024. Then our country made a commitment to the Council of Europe that it would do more to prevent such acts, to prevent scandals in Romanian sports.
In recent years there have been countless scandals, both in Romania and in other European countries, related to match-fixing — from the 2006 scandal in Italy, “Calciopoli”, which was one of the biggest corruption cases, to the one in Turkey last year, when 30 people from the sport were arrested. And in Romania, just this year, two large criminal cases were opened for fixing matches in the lower football leagues.
