No match-fixing, no sports corruption, no betting house fraud. After years of investigations, the head of the Investigative Court number 5 of Huesca, Alicia Bustillo, has issued the provisional dismissal and archiving of the so-called ‘Oikos’ case, which was opened in 2019 for alleged fixing of professional football matches in order to obtain illicit benefits through betting.
Considered at the time one of the biggest corruption scandals in football, the case led to the arrest of active players such as Borja Fernández, who was then a member of Real Valladolid, or former footballers Raúl Bravo and Carlos Aranda, whom Police reports identified them as the alleged main ringleaders of the plot.
But in her order, dated last Monday, the judge concludes that “there is not enough evidence to consider that the main illegal object of this case has been committed,” which is why she proceeds to provisionally dismiss the proceedings and archive the proceedings. Her decision, which she has had the support of the Prosecutor’s Office, is not final and can still be appealed.
The order has not been a surprise either given that, throughout the investigation, some lines of investigation have been closed due to lack of evidence and charges have been lifted against several investigated. Along these lines, the Prosecutor’s Office stated in a letter at the beginning of the month that the investigations had only yielded “conjectures, hypotheses and convincing reasoning but which, it is insisted, do not prove the commission of the crime of sports corruption.”
In her writing, the judge relies on the reasoning of the Prosecutor’s Office and the lawyers of those investigated to conclude that no criminally punishable conduct has been proven against the accused with respect to the crimes of sports corruption, money laundering, house fraud. betting and criminal organization.
It is also supported by a recent ruling from the Supreme Court of January 2023 (Osasuna case) that does not consider it a crime to pay bonuses for winning matches, but rather those intended for players to intentionally lose matches, an issue on which The instructor does not see the existence of evidence in the ‘Oikos’ case.
The judge analyzes in the car each of the five matches under suspicion, played between April 2017 and May 2019, and concludes that there are no indications, neither from the conversations or messages intercepted from those investigated nor from the investigation of the accounts. of some players, that maneuvers were actually made to perpetrate fraud.
Among the matches investigated, the most relevant was the one that Real Valladolid played against Valencia on May 18, 2019 and which the Ché team ended up winning 0-2. The Police maintained that the plot tried to buy the match to make a combined bet. However, the judge considers that the evidence of the purchase of the match is “absolutely insufficient” and that Valladolid’s defeat “was foreseeable, given that nothing was at stake, while Valencia was fighting for a place in another competition.”
In this meeting, the agents focused on Borja Fernández, “Valladolid’s second captain and one of the corrupt targets according to the reports.” However, he always denied that Raúl Bravo had met him to fix the meeting, but that it was to “ask him about job options,” and in September 2020 he was exonerated.
Getafe-Villareal on that same day, which ended in a 2-2 draw, was also under scrutiny due to messages found on Bravo’s cell phone with a third person in which the alleged intention to offer 10,000 euros to each player was discussed. of the Madrid team to win.
The judge maintains that this exchange of messages does not prove the fixing of either of the two matches: “These matches gave rise to a combined bet in which Carlos Aranda lost money by not winning Getafe,” she explains. “There is no sufficient evidence that there was an action aimed at paying for altering the result of the match and, if that were the case, it would have been for winning”, so there would have been no crime, in application of the doctrine of Supreme Court on premiums to third parties.
The case also included three other lower category matches: Sariñena-Cariñena on April 13, 2017; SD Huesca-Gimnastic de Tarragona on May 27, 2018, and Reus-Valladolid on June 4, 2017. The judge was also investigating former soccer player Samuel Saiz as an alleged intermediary who was in charge of “contacting the teams.” This same suspicion extended to former players Íñigo López Montaña and Carlos Caballero Pérez, but his order concludes that “it is only appropriate to decree the provisional dismissal and archive of these events.”
