Wilson Raj, aka SG’s ‘Kelong King,’ once boasted of being FIFA’s most-wanted man. He now faces 11 years in jail.

SINGAPORE: The football match-fixer Wilson Raj Perumal was slapped with an 11-year jail sentence for Human trafficking in Hungary, where he was arrested in July 2020.

Wilson Raj, now 60, was born in Singapore. He was first imprisoned in the city-state for 12 months in 1995 for trying to bribe a football player. In 1999, he received a 26-month jail sentence after it was discovered that he introduced a referee to a match-fixer.

He fled Singapore in 2010 after running afoul of the law yet again. He was charged and convicted for a number of offences, including the assault of an auxiliary police officer.

Wanted in Singapore, has been jailed in the city-state as well as in Finland and Hungary, the “Kelong King” has boasted of his decades-long crime spree, saying in a 2014 CNN interview that he fixed between 80 and 100 matches in his heyday, though this came after cooperating with authorities in Europe to expose an international match-fixing crime ring based in Singapore.

“You may not be familiar with the name Wilson Raj Perumal, but given how prolific he was, you might have watched one of the games he’s fixed,” CNN wrote about Wilson Raj at the time of the interview.

He also wrote a book titled ‘Kelong Kings: Confessions of the world’s most prolific match-fixer,’ together with two Italian journalists, and published in 2014. In it, he claimed to have even influenced some of the events of the Beijing Olympics in 2008, and boasted that he was “FIFA’s most wanted man.”

Wilson Raj’s match-fixing allegedly earned him US$5 million (S$6.5 million), but he said he lost it all through gambling.

“I was on the bench at times, and telling players what to do, giving orders to the coach. It was that easy. There was no policing whatsoever,” he said in the CNN interview.

Terry Steans, a former FIFA match-fixing investigator, told CNN that the authorities had shown him Wilson Raj’s personal phone book, which had officials and players from 38 countries.

Wilson Raj’s revelations were considered invaluable by European authorities, resulting in investigations and arrests. The involvement of another Singaporean, syndicate leader Tan Seet Eng, also known as Dan Tan, was exposed.

While he has lived in Hungary since 2012 as a state witness for match-fixing trials, he was convicted in May on new charges of human trafficking. The Straits Times quoted court documents that say he had been investigated for charges related to “assisting several persons to cross the state border for the purpose of financial gain.”

As he is wanted in Singapore, he may be deported to his home country. /TISG

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